12 mo. ago • 100%

Benefits of Cloudflare Access

For a self-hosted application with a valid SSL certificate and support for OAuth, what are the benefits that Cloudflare Access provides? From what I can tell, it also filters traffic to possibly block attacks? Can it even be used with a self-hosted app if you aren't also running Cloudflare Tunnel? Is there a better alternative (that also integrates with major OAuth providers like Google, Github, etc) for self-hosters? Thanks for the help in understanding how this works.

26 comments

Remember that cloudflare will see your traffic, Even with an ssl certificate.

1
- Right, so I'm trying to determine if that is worse or if exposing a service without Cloudflare (and being more at risk from someone trying to break into my service because of not having the monitoring/protection Cloudflare provides) is worse.
  
  1
  
  If you have an EC2 Amazon Compute Instance, you don’t hear people saying “Amazon can read your data”. Cloudflare is a major provider like Google or Amazon. Use Tailscale if your not convinced
  
  1
Maybe try OCserv for your VPN it is using https as a fallback and never failed me.

1
Benefits have been listed out here by others. The few restrictions I found on the free tier of Cloudflare is that they limit file size for uploads to 200MB. If you were exposing your NAS and want to upload a large file then you need to pay for Cloudflare or it will be restricted.

1
- Didn’t they changed their TOS about streaming?
  
  1
  
  Last I'd checked (a couple years ago), they don't permit media streaming via a free account, just serving static files. (I mean... Fair.)
  
  I had several issues with emby/plex not loading streams through cloudflare connections, or really struggling to do so. Disabling cloudflare proxying for that subdomain solved that.
  
  Now I just have cloudflare proxying my static file server and Ombi. Emby is a direct connection and everything else is behind OpenVPN.
  
  1
Don't forget that Cloudflare offers no protection against traffic from within Cloudflare. There were several incidents in the past where Cloudflares services where used to break into other clients services (hijacking).

1
- Thank you, didn't realise that!
  
  1
- Do you have the examples of this so I can take a look? Was it ports forwarded that were opened to all cloudflare ranges, or tunnels and a backend exploit?
  
  1
  
  You can look online. Basically Cloudflares blocking features exclude Cloudflares own IP ranges. Someone used their own services (in their own IP range) to attack services and since the request came from a Cloudflare IP it was not blocked or filtered. Pretty embarassing if you ask me. But this is normal in the cloud.
  
  1
I can expose things like HASS and my Unifi controller to the public internet, but stick it behind Cloudflare Access (and Office 365) for protection.

I can essentially unlock my door anywhere in the country, as O365 has conditional access setup to block international logins and I’ve got MFA set up on it.

My port forwarding is only enabled for Cloudflare IP’s, as is Nginx (for extra piece of mind) and I’ve got CF client certificates installed as well.

It mitigates the need for me to configure and use a VPN (although I’ve got one of those configured as well) - which I’ve noticed can be disabled on some networks (I always had trouble using VPN’s on T-Mobile in North America when I was there in 2018)

1
- which I’ve noticed can be disabled on some networks
  
  I've found a few networks where my normal VPN connection won't work. Typically they just block all outgoing ports except common ones like 80,443,22,53,etc. I've got a few of those setup so I can try alternates. 22 usually works.
  
  1
I use it within my Kubernetes to expose services outsides my house, and then I use Azure AD to manage access.

I know this isn’t very self hosted, but for me where I have a dynamic IP and don’t want to play with port forwarding, it’s really good. Nice and easy especially with Kubernetes and the helm chart I wrote

1
- Don’t you need to configure DDNS regardless? And port forwarding as well unless you went with tunnels?
  
  1
  
  For cloudflare tunnels no, it does a nat punch through I think it's called, where it connects from inside your network out to 2 edge locations to cloudlfare, where it then can send traffic back and forwards.
  
  If I wanted to expose by port forwarding, then yes you are correct, I could configure ddns.
  
  Personally, I would configure my own version of DDNS where it's just a cron job once every 5 minutes to run terraform and check if my public IP has changed, and if it has run an apply.
  
  Does that answer the question?
  
  1
There’s not much reasons of exposing any of your local services to internet. Use vpn to have access to your local resources. This is best you can come up with for your home lab

1
- Question : what if I need to access my home computer from a work laptop and I’m not allowed to install things such as the WireGuard VPN client. Do I use native say Windows VPN?
  
  1
  
  Assuming it's a Linux server at home and you can use SSH on your work computer, there's a couple ways to do this.
  
  Install a web based terminal client
  
  Setup Cloudflare tunnels on your home server and use the the SSH proxy. I do this with a simple helper in ~/.ssh/config:
  
  Match host "*.cf" ProxyCommand /usr/local/bin/cloudflared access ssh --hostname $(echo %h | sed 's/\.cf$/.homelab.nz/') ForwardAgent yes
  
  1
  
  Never perform personal tasks on work equipment. If it's not something you'd expose to the open net, you definitely shouldn't be accessing it from equipment you don't own.
  
  Get a personal laptop for remote tasks, or use your phone.
  
  1
- For most things I agree but I this case I'm thinking of a service where you want to have a group of people access and they all aren't willing or tech-saavy enough to install a VPN
  
  1

You've viewed 26 comments.