Using HTTPS in Your Homelab, and Why It's Important
When you have a homelab, you’re going to start having a number of internal websites and services you use. You’ll learn to live with HTTPS warnings when navigating to these sites, but these warnings can still be a problem. What if we wanted to have valid HTTPS everywhere?
HTTPS Primer
HTTPS encrypts your traffic so things that intercept it (routers, attackers, etc) can’t decode it, and it does this even with an invalid or self-signed certificate. On a local network, this usually isn’t a big deal. We trust most everything on the network so the risk of someone snooping on our traffic is pretty low.
HTTPS also tries to validate the authenticity of the remote site, and this is really what the warning in your browser is telling you about. This requires a bit more complexity though, since how can we trust a site we’ve never visited before?
To solve this HTTPS uses a series of certificates and what are called Certificate Authorities or CAs. The CAs are institutions that issue certificates that are trusted by your computer or browser and sign other certificates. When a site presents its certificate, it usually will have a chain that leads back to a CA certificate your computer trusts, and therefore communicates that the site should be trusted too.
A more practical example would be friends introducing each other. There’s a new person, Bob, asking for your address. You’ve never met Bob, but Bob says he knows Alice. You’ve met Alice before and trust her, so you ask Alice if she really knows Bob. She tells you the Bob you’ve met is the correct Bob, so you’re able to trust him and give him information.
While you and Bob haven’t met before, you’re able to confirm using a chain of trust that Bob really is Bob. In the example, Bob would be the site, and Alice is the certificate authority.
Why In A Homelab?
As I mentioned before, even with a self-signed certificate, encryption is still working. What I’m really talking about here is the verification aspect of HTTPS that we can use. I’m also only speaking about internal sites that aren’t accessible from the outside world.
Having trust certificates comes with a few benefits for the “classic” attack scenarios:
- No more warnings - Having a habit of clicking through an HTTPS warning is not a good habit. If you have users that may not understand the risk, or carry over the behavior into other sites, this can become an issue.
- Validates Identitiy - Sure, it’s a Homelab and the threat of rogue DNS is probably quite low, but it’s still nice to know that you’re typing passwords or credentials into the server you mean to.
But it also thwarts a new attack vector, especially on mobile devices and networks that use internal DNS: spoofing on other networks.
The idea here is that my phone may try to connect to
https://internal-service.test.local on networks other than my home network.
Usually this hostname simply won’t resolve outside my home, but perhaps through
a DNS cache or malicious intent it does to some random address in the world.
If we don’t have a trusted certificate and had to tell the app to trust any certificate, my phone might connect and start sending credentials or sensitive information. However, if we configured trusted HTTPS certificates everywhere, the random server or spoofed site won’t have the proper certificate and our device won’t connect.
These risks are, admittedly, quite low, but it’s better to be over-prepared and mitigating them is pretty easy.
Method 1 - Let’s Encrypt
Let’s Encrypt is the most ubiquitous free certificates out there. Basically, if you have a public DNS record or public site, you can get certificates through their automated issue process. You can even now do wildcard certificates to cover multiple sites.
Let’s Encrypt has two methods it uses to validate the domain before issuing a certificate, and you need to have one of these working.
In the first method, Let’s Encrypt sends an HTTP request to the host name on the
certificate (service.example.com), and expects a certain challenge response to
come back. This means you need to have Public DNS and a server that listens on
port 80 and is accessible by the world.
The other method uses a challenge DNS record. This bypasses the need to have a
public server at the address, but does mean that only certain DNS providers are
supported, as DNS records need to be created and removed by certbot (the tool
that does the renewals for you).
This makes it a bit more fiddly for a homelab, since you might not be able to self-host websites on your connection or you might not have public DNS setup, but if you have these it’s pretty easy to run.
I won’t delve too much into actually setting up and running certbot because
there’s a lot of documentation already out there on how to use it. Let’s
Encrypt’s getting started guide is a
good resource and covers lots of use cases.
Method 2 - Internal CA
This is a bit more involved, but also is a lot more flexible. Let’s Encrypt requires automation since the certificates are only valid for a few months. Every 3 months (or sooner), you’ll have to renew things which can be a chore, especially if you have to manually upload everything.
An Internal CA bypasses this, but also won’t be trusted by other browsers or computers. If you have a public site or a site that others connect to, this method won’t work.
The process is pretty simple, but will vary based on your setup:
- Generate a certificate authority. Basically, this is just a certificate for signing other certificates.
- Install that CA certificate into the computers. Anything that access these services and you want to it show as trusted will need the CA certificate installed.
- Generate site certificates and keys. These are the certificates that will go to the HTTPS site.
Generate The CA Certificate
First, generate the private key for your CA. You’ll be prompted for a password to secure your private key that you’ll need to remember!
openssl genrsa -des3 -out ca.key 4096
After a few moments, you’ll get a new key that will be the basis of our internal CA. With this key, you can generate any trusted certificate, so do not lose it and do not share it.
Next, we need our root certificate. This is the public side of the CA that we’ll install into our client computers.
openssl req -x509 -new -nodes -key ca.key -sha256 -days 3650 -out ca.pem
During this step, you’ll be prompted for the metadata for your certificate. This will be things like the country, locality, name, etc. You can put anything in these values but I like to keep mine accurate. Also, not all the fields are required. If you don’t want to share something (like an email address), just skip it.
Once complete, you’ll have two files: ca.key, the private key, and ca.pem,
the certificate. Keep these files somewhere safe and secure as you’ll need them
in the future, along with the password.
Install The Certificate
This step varies depending on the OS you are running, but you’ll need to add
ca.pem to all the client devices that will connect. If you don’t know how,
just look up Install CA Cert on <os>.
For Debian and Ubuntu, follow these steps:
- Copy the certificate into /usr/local/share/ca-certificates/
- Run
sudo update-ca-certificates
The certificate should work on most modern systems, so feel free to add to as many machines as you need.
Generate Certificate for Client Machines
First, generate a private key and a Certificate Signing Request:
openssl genrsa -out site.key 2048
openssl req -new -key site.key -out site.csr
When running the second command, you’ll be asked many of the same questions as
when creating your CA certificate. The only thing that you need to put in
correctly on this round is the Common Name, and this should be the DNS name of
the site (ie internal.grumpy.cloud). The extra options are not required.
This generates what’s called a Certificate Signing Request or CSR, and this is what ordinarily would be sent to the certificate authority to sign. This file contains all the metadata for your new certificate they need to actually issue the certificate. Since we’re our own CA though, we’ll just use the file in the next step.
Now we create the site’s certificate using our CA certificate:
openssl x509 -req -in site.csr -CA ca.pem -CAkey ca.key -CAcreateserial -out site.pem -days 365 -sha256
You’ll be prompted for the password of your CA private key, and once complete will have the site’s public certificate. The private key and public certificate are the two components you’ll install on the server.
That’s It!
Now that your server is using the new key, navigating to it in a browser with the CA certificate added will show the normal trusted icon and not have any verification warnings.