2.5 years ago, I migrated all my services hosted on a cloud provider to a homeserver.
This homeserver is also my workstation/gaming/dev/everything. I use QubesOS (an operating system based on the Xen hypervisor), and wrote some document about it: https://neowutran.ovh/qubes/articles/homeserver.pdf
Basically, I am hosting:
- DNS
- Matrix
- Jitsi
- Mumble
- Peertube
- Screego
- Nextcloud
- Searxng
- Tor
- Wireguard VPN
- Copy of wikipedia
- Personal website And others.
And for TLS, to have better security, and to avoid relying on third party company/providers, I am using DANE.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS-based_Authentication_of_Named_Entities
https://sr.ht/~yukikoo/dane_without_root/
https://github.com/buffrr/letsdane
The “dane_without_root” is one of my projects and I am welcoming review / feedback on it
( I also posted about it on the QubesOS forum: https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/highlighting-neowutrans-technical-doc-about-qubes )
I tried QubesOS back in the day. How has it progressed as a desktop. I was always underwhelmed visually. It just seemed rather chunky. Maybe that is intentional.
Of course, if you are going for security, that’s great, but it seemed to me that security and a visually appealing desktop could be blended.
I haven’t know that time. It is indeed now way less chunky than your screenshot. By default it use XFCE, but support also KDE, i3 and other. Before starting to use QubesOS I was on arch with i3, and I kept using i3 on QubesOS
Hi, the sourcehut seems to be pretty interesting. If I understand it correctly, this DANE-without-root provides a TOFU model as an alternative to the normal case of verifying up all the parts of the domain levels, right? If feasible, maybe that could be nice to extend with other methods for OOB verification and key rollover
If I understand it correctly, this DANE-without-root provides a TOFU model as an alternative to the normal case of verifying up all the parts of the domain levels, right?
Indeed. (This part is not in any RFC or DANE standard, it is my idea to improve the system further). If you want to check the current implementation, you can search for ‘tofu’ string in this file: https://git.sr.ht/~yukikoo/dane_without_root/tree/master/item/src/core/dane.rs
and key rollover
This is a case that I didn’t cover, good idea. Probably something like ‘if successfully validated with tofu, then add all the valid dnskey to the valid tofu key list and remove the old ones’. It would still be problematic if a user doesn’t connect for a very long time to a website with tofu support and miss the key rollover, but that still a good improvement over the current tofu implementation. Will do that later.
maybe that could be nice to extend with other methods for OOB verification
Something more specific in mind?
SSL/TLS error on main link.
Yes, this part is intentional to raise questions and remark :)
The certificate on my website is not valid using the WebPKI standard, but is valid using the DANE standard. It is related to my comment for this project https://sr.ht/~yukikoo/dane_without_root/ .
My issue with the WebPKI model is that any government or big company on the planet could do a MITM on your connection, generate a certificate valid for any website, and get a read/write access to all your webpki TLS communications. The DANE model is an improvement over webpki because instead of the “anyone (every ca / intermediate certificate) can generate a certificate valid for anyone” model, it bring a hierarchical trust structure.
You missed my point
It doesn’t work for the user, so it doesn’t work.
Its about equivalent to the user as installing your own cert.
DANE provides user friction…but as OP mentioned TLS doesn’t work
Which means I don’t care because nobody except myself will be able to use it.
I’d care a lot if Firefox and Chrome supported it OOTB
