Hardening checklist for production deployments (auth, safe defaults, docs)

[Cristliu]

We’re sharing a platform-agnostic hardening checklist distilled from a cross-platform study of self-hosted LLM deployments. The high-level takeaway: many exposed assets are accessible, and a large fraction of those allow unauthenticated interactions when misconfigured—so defaults and docs matter a lot.

Suggested checklist

• Bind to localhost by default; require explicit opt-in for 0.0.0.0.
• First-run setup must create admin credentials; refuse to start otherwise.
• Auth everywhere for non-inference routes; consider inference-only mode/tokens.
• Endpoint classification (public / authenticated / admin) with rate limiting and conservative CORS/CSRF.
• Security health check endpoint or startup banner when risky settings are detected.
• Production docs & examples: reverse-proxy/TLS templates, firewall rules, and guidance for container permissions.

We can provide platform-specific notes privately via security contacts if maintainers want to pursue targeted improvements.

[iwr-redmond]

This project is EOL, see #3558 (comment)