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Ngrok: Secure tunnels to localhost

ngrok.com

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Re: Ngrok: Secure tunnels to localhost

#171

Post by marmaduke »

kuschku wrote: post #120
marmaduke wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I came here to mention Scaleway ARM servers which cost 3/mo with unlimited bandwidth. With reverse SSH tunneling, there's no need for a dedicated service.

This issue gets worse if you use multiple such services. Alone they’re worth it, but combined... IRCCloud (4$) + ngrok (10$) + some free libre email provider (5$) + 1TB cloud storage (10-12$) + ... The combined cost for me is enough that it’s cheaper to rent a dedicated octacore xeon with 16G ram, 250G SSD and 1TB HDD and unlimited traffic with a 1Gbps line[1], and run my own services. In fact, I pay less than 50% of…

The 4 core ARM would probably be sufficient for what you listed, unless you anticipate touching the data going through (e.g. transcoding videos etc)

Re: Ngrok: Secure tunnels to localhost

#173

Post by fny »

philsnow wrote: post #163
enraged_camel wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is correct. You still need to have a service listening on the port you have mapped ngrok to. So simply using ngrok is not a security risk.

well, if you've exposed your dev app running on your laptop to the internet, any exploit in your app now works against your laptop endpoint instead of a production endpoint. your laptop is a very different environment from production: there are probably different protections, firewalls, monitoring, etc in place. additionally, while your laptop (hopefully) doesn't have direct access to production databases, you probab…

What's the problem with exposing port 3000 to let someone demo an app for an hour? By the time someone discovers the exposed address and port, and then figures out how to exploit the service that's running, I'll have already shut down the service.

Re: Ngrok: Secure tunnels to localhost

#174

Post by Posibyte »

inconshreveable wrote: post #2

Hiya there folks - I'm the creator of ngrok, happy to answer any questions

I don't have a question, but I did want to thank you so much for this service. For our usage, which involves lots of disparate services sitting in all sorts of places, it makes it quick and painless to shuffle around our graph of connections between them for development, debugging, and production testing.

It's a service that, for us, is worth its weight in gold for all the configuration and maintenance we don't have to do. It's definitely one of the first tools in our toolbox we reach for. Thank you very much for ngrok!

Re: Ngrok: Secure tunnels to localhost

#175

Post by [deleted] »

nthcolumn wrote: post #146
Arcsech wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does this compare to https://localtunnel.github.io/www/ ?

One is a big proprietary blob of mistrust and the other is localtunnel? Sorry if that sounds harsh but it's a shame I can't build and make sure that everything is above board. Good on you though , that apart it seems a great idea well implemented. Easy to throw stuff up for prospects/clients in an agile way without having to talk to devops. Why not free as in bird? It is already free as in beer.

[deleted]

Re: Ngrok: Secure tunnels to localhost

#177

Post by ryall »

bigbugbag wrote: post #54
ryall wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean: "why can't I set up port forwarding on my firewall, then create a DNS record for my domain that points to my current IP, then wait for that to propagate around the internet before I can use it, then do it all again when I move from e.g. office->home or my IP changes because of my ISP"? No reason.

Man you'll be floored when you'll learn about this thing called dynamic DNS, and even better it's been around for 20 years ? more ? Anyways my ISP has provided me with a fixed IP for about 17 years.

You're still going to need to set up port forwarding on the firewall of each site you develop at, and if you use DHCP with no static assignment... more fun. Honestly it depends on your use case, port forwarding and dyndns is trivial to configure, but if you're using development time to do it more than a few times then it's a non-trivial efficiency leak

Re: Ngrok: Secure tunnels to localhost

#178

Post by nthcolumn »

nthcolumn wrote: post #146
Arcsech wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does this compare to https://localtunnel.github.io/www/ ?

One is a big proprietary blob of mistrust and the other is localtunnel? Sorry if that sounds harsh but it's a shame I can't build and make sure that everything is above board. Good on you though , that apart it seems a great idea well implemented. Easy to throw stuff up for prospects/clients in an agile way without having to talk to devops. Why not free as in bird? It is already free as in beer.

My bad totally - I could not see the link? Great effort!

Re: Ngrok: Secure tunnels to localhost

#179

Post by afarrell »

Lazare wrote: post #61

A lot of people seem to be a bit confused about the point of ngrok, why it's useful, how much it costs, etc. Let me try and help out. :) For me, the killer feature for ngrok is testing/developing webhooks. You install ngrok in your dev environment, start it up, then point the stripe/slack/whatever webhook your working on at the generated URL. ngrok will 1) proxy that request through to your dev environment 2) log the…

It is also really useful for teaching someone how to use webhooks if you are a SAAS provider writing API docs.

Re: Ngrok: Secure tunnels to localhost

#180

Post by philsnow »

fny wrote: post #173
philsnow wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well, if you've exposed your dev app running on your laptop to the internet, any exploit in your app now works against your laptop endpoint instead of a production endpoint. your laptop is a very different environment from production: there are probably different protections, firewalls, monitoring, etc in place. additionally, while your laptop (hopefully) doesn't have direct access to production databases, you probab…

What's the problem with exposing port 3000 to let someone demo an app for an hour? By the time someone discovers the exposed address and port, and then figures out how to exploit the service that's running, I'll have already shut down the service.

true, maybe there's no problem for your use case. using something like ngrok is a gamble:

if the only thing on the line is low-value things like whatever is on your personal laptop (or even whatever is on a spartan vanilla ubuntu VM that your app is running in), then maybe it's not a very big gamble.

if the laptop has corporate secrets on it or it can be used as by an attacker to pivot into company internal systems through the VPN you're also connected to, however, that's a completely different story.

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