Sandcats.io: free dynamic DNS for Sandstorm users

I faced the same problem; came up with the same solution :) http://willwarren.com/2014/07/03/roll-dynamic-dns-service-us...

I setup http://dhcp.io/ for that purpose - also wrapping Route53.

The code is open, though I had to stop new users from registering to avoid abuse. (Sigh.)

(Hi! I'm the author of the blog post & maintainer of the Sandcats service.)

I'm excited about Sandstorm eventually helping people tackle issues like port forwarding. There's enough to do that it's not something I'm personally prioritizing, but it would definitely be very interesting. I can imagine the initial version of this feature working using UPnP for example, for routers that support it.

Thanks for taking an interest in Sandstorm!

As for ngrok-style tunneling, that's something I'm less interested in hosting/maintaining as part of the Sandcats toolkit for Sandstorm self-hosters. I'd be happy to see Sandstorm grow the ability to integrate with services that offer something ngrok-like, though.

Somewhat hilariously, a Tor hidden service is easy to set up and has built-in NAT traversal, if I understand things correctly, so maybe one day we'll see a "Run your Sandstorm server as a Tor hidden service" feature purely for the connectivity conveniences.

Better support for DNS SRV records[1] in client apps would help here and outside of Sandstorm, too.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRV_record

If you are using it for your own use, you can use a self-signed certificate. I think that browsers will warn you if your self-signed certificate changes, even in the absence of certificate pinning (because it is a new-untrusted certificate). If not, then something like certificate patrol[1] should help.

And let's face it - if you are using Sandstorm for the next year or so, you probably understand what a self-signed certificate is.

[1] http://patrol.psyced.org/

TL;DR: We're working on that one; stay tuned. ;)

Long version: Yes, Sandstorm requires a wildcard host for security purposes. In general, by splitting things up into lots of small, isolated units, we can protect against bugs in apps. For example:

- First, obviously, hosting each app on a separate origin (hostname) is important if you don't want a bug in one app to allow compromise of other apps or Sandstorm itself (or if you want to run apps that you don't necessarily trust). Since we want app installation to be a one-click process, we need to generate hostnames automatically. But we go a lot further than just allocating a host for each app.

- By hosting every Etherpad document in a separate, isolated container, we can protect you against bugs in Etherpad that leak information from one document to another. Several such bugs have been disclosed in the last few months; none affected Etherpad on Sandstorm.

- By hosting Wordpress's edit interface on a separate host from the public web view -- guarded by Sandstorm access control -- and making the public view read-only, we can protect you against security problems in Wordpress. Several such bugs have been disclosed in the last few months; none affect Wordpress on Sandstorm.

- By creating a new unguessable throw-away host name for every session -- i.e. every time you open the same document, it's on a different host, and that host expires when you close it -- we can protect against XSRF, clickjacking, and reflected-XSS attacks in apps, because the attacker does not know to what hostname to address the attacks.

So there's a lot of really huge advantages to having a wildcard host available. The big disadvantage is that wildcard SSL is expensive -- around $100/yr at its cheapest. But that's an artificial price based on CA's perception that wildcard certs are only needed by people who can pay a lot -- it doesn't cost them any more to create the certs, they're just doing price segmentation. So instead of solving the problem by giving up on our nice security properties in order to make non-wildcard certs work, maybe we can solve the problem in meatspace by convincing the CAs that Sandstorm calls for a different pricing model.

And that's all I can say for the moment. :)

This seems like it's for people setting up their own sandstorm instances.

Managed hosting will come Real Soon Now. :) https://sandstorm.io/preorder.html

But we hope sandcats.io makes it clear that we are dedicated to supporting self-hosting as well.