I pay for the Nabu Casa subscription for remote access to Home Assistant. Mostly as a way to give them money for a great service, but it’s convenient and felt pretty secure. It should be the only remote way into Home Assistant. About an hour ago I got a login attempt notice that an IP was trying to access API/config. The IP is in some bad IP databases. What I found interesting was that the log shows an AI bot. A Google Gemini bot specifically. Makes me worry that AI is going to make yet another aspect of life frustrating and unfun.
How are they casually finding these home assistant servers? I sure hope people dont have port 8123 exposed publicly like that? Are you all broadcasting it in to the ether?
If you use a publicly trusted TLS certificate (either directly, or via Nabu Casa offering), domain will be recorded in Certificate Transparency logs.
You can slightly hide it if you use a wildcard domain in the TLS certificate (e.g.
*.example.com), and then use a subdomain for the service. Ideally, something that’s nothome/hass/ha.example.com, or otherwise easily guessable.Because there are a limited number of IPv4 addresses and bots scan them for open ports.
Nabu Casa offers a reverse proxy through their own services. I run mine this way. Haven’t really had any problems with it in the year I’ve been subscribed.
Wait. Is this really all that nabu casa is doing? Why in the ever loving fuck would anybody agree to that, let alone pay them for it?
Looks like it’s true. They are even leaking all the hostnames in the certificate transparency logs for the bots to scrape. Just when you think you’ve seen it all…
Haha heck no, at least not in my case. It’s not impossible to just stumble on the domain. An infinite monkey sorta thing.