Can you expose Home Assistant on the internet?
Just putting a port up is not secure. You should definitely consider encrypting your traffic if you are accessing your Home Assistant installation remotely. For details please check the set up encryption using Let's Encrypt blog post or this detailed guide to using Let's Encrypt with Home Assistant.
How do I access my Home Assistant externally?
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How do you secure DuckDNS?
How to set up a DuckDNS domain.LetsEncrypt, a trusted Certificate Authority.PiHole setup – block ads & choose upstream DNS servers.Secure remote access with OpenVPN.OpenVPN & PiHole test.Support.
How do I secure my Home Assistant on Raspberry Pi?
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Is Duckdns secure?
Malicious behavior The domain duckdns.org hosts a free service which will point a DNS (sub domains of duckdns.org) to an IP of your choice. Unfortunately this service is often abused by phishers.
Is Nabu Casa secure?
Access from anywhere, this allows you to access your Home Assistant installation from anywhere. Easy connection to voice assistants, this allows easy integration with Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa. Security, Nabu Casa takes care of the security and hardening. You no longer need to worry about this.
How do I make my Home Assistant secure?
If you want secure remote access, the easiest option is to use Home Assistant cloud by which you also support the founders of Home Assistant. Another option is to use TLS/SSL via the add-on Duck DNS integrating Let's Encrypt. To expose your instance to the internet, use a VPN, or an SSH tunnel.
Is DuckDNS a reverse proxy?
Home Assistant Remote Access using reverse proxy DuckDNS & NGINX – prerequisites. For this tutorial you will need a working Home Assistant with Supervisor & Add-ons store. That means, your installation type should be either Home Assistant OS or Home Assistant Supervised.
What is DuckDNS?
DuckDNS is a free dynamic DNS service that allows you to point a subdomain under duckdns.org at your computer. If you are running the Home Assistant DuckDNS add-on this integration is not required. The add-on will keep your IP updated with DuckDNS.
Can Home Assistant work without internet?
As long as your local network stays up and your integrations don't depend on an external service you should be able to continue to use it. When your WAN connection is down what kind of issue are you having when trying to connect locally?
Which is better OpenHab or Home Assistant?
Recommendation: Home Assistant vs OpenHab What Is Best At the end of the day, it's an individual choice, you can either choose the no-fuss and easy to integrate UI that comes with Home Assistant or lean towards the more flexible style of coding backed by more advanced goals in the case of OpenHab.
Why are Raspberry Pi sold out?
"Demand for Raspberry Pi products increased sharply from the start of 2021 onwards, and supply constraints have prevented us from flexing up to meet this demand, with the result that we now have significant order backlogs for almost all products.
How do I access my Home Assistant dashboard?
To start, go to the Home Assistant Overview page, click on the three dots at the top right of the screen and select 'Edit Dashboard'. Then click on the blue '+ Add Card' icon at the bottom right and select a card to add.
How do I access Home Assistant in cloud?
To get started, open Home Assistant, go to the cloud page in the configuration panel. Find the remote box and enable the toggle. The first time you enable it, Home Assistant Cloud will have to generate and validate the certificate. This can take up to 60 seconds.
Why Home Assistant Doesn't Work Remotely by Default
The reason it's almost impossible for remote functionality to work out of the box is quite technical but can still be understood if we accept certain facts about home networking. First, your average router (which is often a box your Internet Service Provider (ISP) gives you) will be hard at work protecting your network.
Why Using Regular Remote Access Could be Insecure
The reality is that most people trust a product's instructions to provide the best way of achieving their goal. Unfortunately, when it comes to Home Assistant and remote access, the instructions are focused more on ease of use rather than security.
How a Reverse Proxy Fixes All Our Problems
A proxy is a service that hides your identity to internet services by collecting all their customers' connections and routing them through a few IP addresses which belong to the proxy company. As such, a third-party website can no longer tell who exactly is sending this information or where they live.
Prerequisites For Running a Reverse Proxy With Home Assistant
While the proxy helps tremendously, unfortunately, it adds some complexity to the standard process seen here. What exactly you need to do will depend on your setup, but we will assume that you are using the same computer for this as you are for Home Assistant.
Setting up a Reverse Proxy For Home Assistant
We will be using Apache, but you could also use Nginx if you wanted to. The configuration will be done differently, but they are both equally as good for this purpose.
Checklist
Here’s the summary of what you must do to secure your Home Assistant system:
Remote Access
If you want secure remote access, the easiest option is to use Home Assistant cloud by which you also support the founders of Home Assistant.
Extras for manual installations
As well as the above we advise that you consider the following to improve security:
What port is Home Assistant on?
You just have to open port 443 in your router and forward it to your local Home Assistant IP on port 8123 . You also have to assign a static IP address for the server where your Home Assistant is installed. If you don’t know how to do that just ask in the comments section below or search in Google.
How to change password on Home Assistant?
Log in your Home Assistant and click on your username in the lower left corner of the screen. Then do the following: Change your password with a password that contains: letters in upper and lower case, digits and special characters. It will be best if you use this password only for your Home Assistant and nowhere else.
Does Home Assistant have a warning?
That means – you will receive warnings from your browser when you access the https version of your local Home Assistant. Depending of the browser that you are using you may add your local Home Assistant https address as exclusion once and you will not receive any warnings after that.
What is home assistant?
Home Assistant is a free and open-source system for home automation and allows you to view the status and control various IoT and smart devices in your home. Once Home Assistant is setup it will scan your network for devices and identify them. You can setup credentials for these devices and with the help of a plugin for the device, ...
Can you control lights with Home Assistant?
You can setup credentials for these devices and with the help of a plugin for the device , it can be controlled and automated through Home Assistant’s web dashboard. You can control lights, thermostats, robot vacuum cleaners and many more devices. Home Assistant.
Is HA a good system?
However, if you’re installing and using smart devices in your home, HA is a very popular system to command and control them, and adds a lot of utility to your home. It can also make it easy to monitor these devices when you’re away from home. That being said, I’d personally would want an extra layer of security.
Can Home Assistant scan local network?
However, Home Assistant can scan your local network to automatically detect of devices it supports. This is convenient if you have a lot of devices.
What are the two aspects of security?
So in terms of security, there are two aspects to consider. First is data privacy and second is the overall security implementation . The first, data privacy, is one of the main reasons people opt for DIY Home Assistant hub over one bought off of a retail shelf.
Does Home Assistant have 2FA?
I should also note that Home Assistant does provide a 2FA (two-factor authentication) method that works with most authenticator apps. That’s another win on the security front as is the fact that Home Assistant is an open-source project.
User accounts
When you start Home Assistant for the first time the owner user account is created. This account has some special privileges and can:
Other authentication techniques
Home Assistant provides several ways to authenticate. See the Auth Providers section.
Troubleshooting
If you’re seeing authentication failures from 127.0.0.1 and you’re using the nmap device tracker, you should exclude the Home Assistant IP from being scanned.
What does the Home Assistant Supervisor do?
The Home Assistant Supervisor will notify the user when a possible insecure installation is found that uses custom integrations. The Home Assistant Companion apps for Android and iOS have been updated to notify the user if their Home Assistant instance is potentially insecure.
When will HACS be released in 2021?
If you have used any of the custom integrations with a known vulnerability, we recommend that you update your credentials. On the morning of Thursday, January 14 2021, the custom integration Home Assistant Community Store (HACS) project was informed by security researcher Oriel Goel about a security vulnerability.
Is Home Assistant vulnerable?
If you do not use custom integrations, your Home Assistant is not vulnerable. If you do use custom integrations, your instance might be vulnerable if you use one of the impacted integrations. Multiple custom integrations were found that allowed an attacker to steal any file without logging in.
What is remote access?
While this may be obvious to some, remote access is the feature that allows users to control their home from outside the local network over the internet. Most commercial hubs simply have a cloud service that accepts your commands and forwards them to your home, but since Home Assistant is the server, there are a few extra steps to take.
How does it work?
The principle is quite simple. It involves "forwarding" a port on your router to the outside world which effectively makes that port open for external traffic to flow in. Then when you use your public IP address, you will be connected to the correct computer within your network.
Before starting checklist
Before you begin, you will need to have a few things on hand. Notably:
Setting it all up
In this section, we are going to perform the actual setup. There are several ways to do the dynamic DNS step, but the port forwarding step should be fairly ubiquitous.
Securing the system
This is critical. When you expose a computer to the outside world, it becomes almost sure that it will be attacked by hackers or bots. Bad actors run bots that attempt to use known exploits on any public IP address they can find, so if your system is vulnerable, you will get hacked.
Remotely Access and Control Home Assistant
Setup and Start Containers
- Below is the compose file we’re going to use. It includes a container called pktriot-tunnel for running and hosting our Packetriot tunnel and another called home-assistantfor running HA. Typically you want to run containers within their own virtual network. This helps isolate them from the host and is good from a security perspective. However, Home Assistant can scan your local …
Setup Tunnel & Traffic Rules
- We’re going to configure and setup the traffic rule for the tunnel that will serve our Home Assitant service. In this tutorial we are using a custom domain, so be sure to verifya custom domain you own that you are using to follow along. Change into the containers directory. We’ll use the command docker exec -it to execute a command inside the pktriot container to configure a new …
Initial Home Assistant Setup
- We’ll be visiting the URL https://ha.packetdemo.comto access our HA instance. You will be presented with a page from Home Assistant to setup a user and their credentials. Once you create your user will be able to set or confirm a location for your home and make a few other small customizations. Finally, you’ll be presented the dashboard for Home Assistant. Our tutorial ends …
Companion Apps
- HA includes support for companion apps on smart phones/tablets and supports iOS and Android. So you can control your smart home from the couch or while you’re away. I’d like to walk through some of the setup for the iOS application so we can review what information needs to be input while setting up a mobile app. Initially you’ll be presented with a view to begin the HA instance c…
Software Updates
- With this installation keeping up with software should be easy, this is because all of our application data for all of our containers (Home Assistant, Packetriot) is being stored on the host and not inside the container. Below are commands you can run to refresh all the software for all of the containers.
Security Improvements
- I don’t run Home Assistant on my home network, I just haven’t jumped on the smart home bandwagon yet. However, if you’re installing and using smart devices in your home, HA is a very popular system to command and control them, and adds a lot of utility to your home. It can also make it easy to monitor these devices when you’re away from home. That being said, I’d persona…
Conclusion
- I’m very impressed with the amount of plugins and devices Home Assistant supports. HA has an pretty awesome community as well. I think if you’re looking at home automation then Home Assistant is the right software to consider setting up and the eco-system is there to support any smart or IoT devices you setup in your home. We did not cover all options and configurations fo…