this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
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Security of running Headscale on a VPS (programming.dev)
submitted 1 week ago by McMonster@programming.dev to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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Did anyone paranoid like me research security implications of running Tailscale/Headscale or similiar?

Right now I'm self-hosting headscale controller in my LAN and expose it to public Internet. I'm thinking about moving it to a VPS, but I'm a little paranoid about exposing the software that controls connectivity between my and family machines to a third party, be it official Tailscale controller or VPS provider where I run Headscale.

Currently I think that even in the worst case of someone compromising my Headscale instance it should still be fine as long as all of the machines are properly firewalled and all of the exposed apps and services are behind authentication. I run everything behind Authentik and only keys for SSH access. I will certainly add some network monitoring to all of that.

Any opions and suggestions on this matter are welcome.

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[–] xinayder@infosec.pub 2 points 1 week ago

I had the same considerations when I self-hosted headscale as the controller for accessing my VPS. However, I figured that it shouldn't be a big deal, and there's no chance of someone registering rogue devices on your mesh, because, even though any device can request enrollment to Tailscale, ultimately you need to execute a command in your headscale server to confirm the enrollment/account creation, so there shouldn't be that much of a problem leaving the web server exposed.