I have been thinking about self-hosting my personal photos on my linux server. After the recent backdoor was detected I’m more hesitant to do so especially because i’m no security expert and don’t have the time and knowledge to audit my server. All I’ve done so far is disabling password logins and changing the ssh port. I’m wondering if there are more backdoors and if new ones I made I can’t respond in time. Appreciate your thoughts on this for an ordinary user.
What you can (and absolutely should) do is DNS delegation. On your main domain you delegate the
_acme-challenge.subdomains with NS records to your DNS server that will do cert generation (and cert generation only). You probably want to run Bind there (since it has decent and fast remote access for changing records and other existing solutions). You can still split it with separate keys into different zones (I would suggest one key per certificate, and splitting certificates by where/how they will be used).You don’t even need to allow remote access beyond the DNS responses if you don’t want to, and that server doesn’t have anything to do with anything else in your infrastructure.
Ok, so no API at all. Its the internal DNS server itself that runs certbot and makes the changes locally?
Yes, that’s one option. Then you only have to distribute the certificates and keys.
Or you allow remote access to that DNS server (Bind has a secure protocol for this), do the challenge requests and cert generation on some other machine. Depends on what is more convenient for you (the latter is better if you have lots of machines/certs).
Worst case if someone compromises that DNS server they can only generate certificates but not change your actual valuable records because these are not delegated there.