By no means an expert, bit I’ll try: One technique would b asymmetric encryption. Every participant has two keys, a public and a private one. When I want to send you an encrypted message, I encrypt the message with your public key. This key you can make available in any way, it can’t be used in a harmful way. The message I encrypted with you public, you can decrypt using your private key, and only with that. Like this, you only need to exchange public keys used only for encryption. So no useful information for an attacker. And private keys never need to leave your hands.

To follow up on this: I now use a combination of caddy as reverse proxy and authelia for authentication. In my opinion caddy is the best reverse proxy, it’s super lightweight and the caddyfiles are super easy to read. Authelia is surprisingly easy to get setup. I was a bit hesitant because it looked a little overwhelming in the beginning. When you sit down for half a day and dig into it, it’s really surprisingly straightforward.

I found that before and it’s really interesting. I didn’t really find it easy to understand, though. Maybe I’ll look into it again. As I understand it, you wouldn’t even need caddy, oauth2-proxy itself can act as reverse proxy, right?

It really does look cool. It can be deployed using Docker. I’ll have a look at it.

Well yeah, basic auth is surely the easiest method … though I rather like to go the oauth2/OIDC route.