I have everything I host and expose behind authelia (which requires 2fa) as middleware or as the only login method with oicd, thus far it seems to work well, of course I get a bunch of malicious traffic and spam but this gets to authelia and stops there, I don’t even see multiple tried login tries ever so I felt pretty safe. However it does seem that everyone uses either fail2ban or crowdsec in addition so I have been wondering if it would really add any security in my setup or if I’m missing something. I’m sure it wouldn’t hurt but crowdsec always seemed a little too complex for me and I don’t want something I don’t fully understand in my security layer and I never saw a nice way to setup fail2ban so never bothered. Afaik there’s no webui or such things and you have to manually make working regex for everything. I’d like to know if I’m missing something or if anyone has tipps to give
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Generally, your auth provider (assuming setup correctly) should be one of the most secure components of your internet-exposed setup. That being said, vulnerabilities can and do occur. Adding a combination of Crowdsec, OWASP CRS, other ModSecurity rulesets, and/or fail2ban will add a degree of migitation of potential exploits by blacklisting known bad actors/active bad behavior.
Above all, you should have a plan to keep aware of updates to your publicly-exposed software and be able to deploy those updates in a timely fashion.
Was thinking about the same thing before settling on mTLS. Seems like a fantastic defense so far.
Authelia should come with rate limiting to protect against brute-force attacks. That could be enough.
I’d generally advise to make sure such protection actually works. Like look up the limits and try to login with a wrong password 30 times… Especially if you added stuff on top (fail2ban, crowdsec…). Has happened to me I misconfigured stuff and it didn’t limit anything… Now I check to make sure for important bits like an authentication service.
Do make sure that you can eventually get back in after testing, though. Sure, it’s safer when even you can’t access it, but… :p
Security works in layers. You don’t know if there’s a vulnerability in Authelia.
sure but if there would be an exploit in authelia would f2b even help, isnt the way it works that it blocks mostly spam and known bad traffic? If its already known by filterlists i feel its safe to assume its patched in authelia
Please don’t expose your services to the internet directly. Use something like Tailscale/Headscale/whatever mesh VPN is relevant now. It’ll always be 100 times better than this and you wouldn’t worry about Authelia, f2b and CrowdSec (though updating your services and server(s) is always worth it).
