

Why shutdown the homelab in the first place? Are you trying to save on power consumption?
The other idea I had was to use another lower power device spoofing the server’s Mac. But it seems like it would require an ethernet hub and those don’t really exist anymore.





More details about the k-anonimity process. https://blog.cloudflare.com/validating-leaked-passwords-with-k-anonymity/
The short answer is that they download a partial list of passwords that hash to values starting with the same 5 characters as yours and then check if your password hash is in that list locally. This gives the server very little information about your password if it was not breached and more if it was (but then you should change it anyway), making an elegant compromise