Comment by FabCH | Hacker News Reader

Comment by FabCH | Hacker News Reader

A lot of people talking about encryption in the comment section, thought I would share my setup. I have been running Immich for family and friends on a Hetzner auction server for about 1.5 years now.

Hetzner community provides official full-disk encryption documentation:

https://community.hetzner.com/tutorials/install-debian-with-...

Letsencrypt gives free reliable SSL. You can easily hide Immich behind Nginx proxy that handles SSL for you.

Add cron based automated backup of the entire Immich data to a local encrypted NAS and there you go. Reliable, end-to-end, encrypted at rest setup. So far, it required exactly 0 maintenance.

It’s also more secure because I just drop traffic from all but 3 geographies at the IP level. And you can also add a WAP on the Nginx proxy.

It is also more more secure than Google/iCloude because the „employee of the company“ attack vector is much smaller. It’s documented that Google looks at your photos and is perfectly happy to file false police reports: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/08/googles-scans-private-...

By comparison, yes it is theoretically possible for Hetzner employees to access my server physically and extract the encryption key from RAM, or setup a fake SSH server to try to steal the key, but that is far more complicated attack and hasn’t been documented yet. And it risks detection.

FYI the setup you mention is not "end-to-end" encrypted. E2EE means client-to-client encrypted, with the server processing encrypted bits only. Your approach is encryption in transit and at rest. At rest is relatively irrelevent for large cloud providers, as they are probably better at managing the lifecycle of disks than most businesses or people. It's unlikely someone's going to physically rob a data center or end up with a refurb drive that hasn't been thoroughly processed and wiped.

It's not necessarily more secure than managed providers either, simply because you are probably not a security engineer, and have far less resources to secure your server. It does prevent Google/iCloud from scraping your data, but it certainly does not mean Hetzner can't access your data. They control the overarching hypervisor and control plane managing your servers/VM's, so there's no way to know what capabilities have been implemented. The majority of what intelligence agencies are capable of has not been leaked or documented publicly.

I do happen to have some experience.

For 99.99% of the population, does the threat model really include targeted NSA attack with higher probability than „Google’s automated system sent the police to my door“? No, no it doesn’t.

It is demonstrably more secure for even a semi experienced sysop to host Immich for their family than for them to use Google/Apple.

But I do agree that _some_ experience is required.

Hetzner has fewer employees I guess, but since your photos are decrypted there, you have basically the same problem.

In memory. If the police shows up and they disconnect my server to sieze it, for example, the photos are lost to them.

And the Hetzner employee would need to specifically target me, because I doubt they would implement a dragnet that pierces through the bespoke random process on my bare metal server to scan the photos in memory.

That is a lot more secure than „Google scans all pictures routinely and fully automatically sends the police to your door, and you have no recourse if they are wrong“ that the EFF article discussed.

He's understandably using the wrong term because E2EE should include private servers as a variant, but does not by definition. In the case where I own the server end of the communication, the data being fully encrypted on that server is far less important than when it is stored in the cloud. The effect is the same however, since sending encrypted photos over HTTPS to be decrypted client side would be completely unnecessary in most cases.

This is not end to end encryption. There is nothing stopping you (or Hetzner) from accessing your family’s data, as one the disks are mounted to a host they are decrypted and available for use.

True E2EE would be that all data on those disks is encrypted by the client your family uses, so even if you combed through the disk volume you would only see cipher text

This is only true if you are so highly individualistic you don’t consider a family unit as a single entity.

If you consider nuclear family as an entity, it’s e2ee. Practically.

Putting aside the fact that yes, the server can be compromised if somebody chose to attach to the live RAM and recover keys. But practically, nobody will. Same way Google will not deliver a special compromised image of the mobile app on my phone, even though they completely can.

It's a definition question. E2ee means in this cases that "the server" cannot decipher the data: the keys to that are only on the client and never shared with the server.

This setup simply does fit the definition. And trying to say it is "e2ee practically" is a bit dishonest: there is no definition for "practical e2ee".

The point of e2ee is that you do not have to trust the server (see Bitwarden for instance).

What is the relevant definition of client and server if they are both peer devices under roughly equal level of control of a single entity?

The client in your family members devices has encryption keys that you do not have in your client or on the server

Ok but again, that is introducing an arbitrary split that is not based on tech. What if I have two phones? Would you expect phone A to see images taken by phone B? If yes, obviously my phones need to share keys.

So what is different in saying „All family devices should see images taken by any device“? They are all clients, including the storage&processing device.

Insisting that E2EE have „ends“ on clients is not useful. It’s much better to define „end“ based on control.

E2EE, by definition, means that the server storing the data can't decrypt it. Your server can decrypt the data. Thus, it's not E2EE. Is this a problem? No. You've decided that the server is trusted (a "peer device"), so it's fine if the server can decrypt the data. That's a perfectly reasonable security posture, but it's still not E2EE.

I don’t think there is a formal definition of E2EE.

Here’s Wikipedia’s definition:

„End-to-end encryption (E2EE) is a method of implementing a secure communication system where only the sender and intended recipient can read the messages“

Note the complete lack of client/server distinction. It’s simply about intended recipients.

In many cases "transport encryption" would also fit that definition.

E2ee is quite well established imho. The server at Hetzner (a.k.a. "someone else's computer") is NOT to be trusted in e2ee schemes. Until today I'd be willing to say everyone agrees on this, but now I doubt that :)

I think that is a bit stretch.

Let's see e.g. Wikipedia:

> End-to-end encryption (E2EE) is a method of implementing a secure communication system where only the sender and intended recipient can read the messages

It is only about the sender and intended recipient. In this case, if they actually would self-host, the server and sending devices are in the same entity group and it is encrypted where it matters. In the case of Hetzner, it is not, because Hetzner can access the machines as they are not in the sender's or receivers basement.

But there are some other benefits with E2EE if going strictly with "client-to-client" model - if server is compromised by the bug, there is higher chance that then data gets stolen as plaintext.

True. But the server is not completely unprotected even if not stored in my basement.

The disks are fully encrypted, so the attacker must be careful not to accidentally interrupt power or force a reboot.

And they can’t just log into the machine, it is still a normal Linux machine with passwords.

So they need to attach to a running system and actively hack it, which is completely possible but is not going to be done by a random employee for no reason.

I see e2e encryption over photo galleries a must since is a way of protecting yourself against misconfigured servers, future exploits or unpatched software.

how much storage and how much do you pay Hetzner?

Prices have jumped considerably, but basically anything on Server Auction is good https://www.hetzner.com/sb/

I pay 60/month for 50 TB with a 10 year old intel xenon.

If you want a cheaper alternative, maybe look into ServaRica. That's where I run my Immich instance for my wife and me. 4TB for $11 per month. The servers (cpus) are not super fast, but fast enough for me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com