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Hi folks. So, I know due to a myriad of reasons I should not allow Jellyfin access to the open internet. However, in trying to switch family over from Plex, I'll need something that "just works".

How are people solving this problem? I've thought about a few solutions, like whitelisting ips (which can change of course), or setting up VPN or tail scale (but then that is more work than they will be willing to do on their side). I can even add some level of auth into my reverse proxy, but that would break Jellyfin clients.

Wondering what others have thought about for this problem

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[–] daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

You can share jellyfin over the net.

The security issues that tend to be quoted are less important than some people claim them to be.

For instance the unauthorized streaming bug, often quoted as one of the worst jellyfin security issues, in order to work the attacker need to know the exact id of the item they want to stream, which is virtually impossible unless they are or have been an authorized client at some point.

Just set it up with the typical bruteforce protections and you'll be fine.

[–] BlackEco@lemmy.blackeco.com 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This. Just setup fail2ban or similar in front of Jellyfin and you'll be fine.

[–] MaggiWuerze@feddit.org 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's not impossible, Far from it. The ids are not random uuids but hashes derived from the path. Since most people have a similar setup to organize their media, this gets trivial very fast

[–] synestine@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you're worried about it, make sure to not use a default path. Then legit clients are fine but these theoretical attackers get stymied.

[–] MaggiWuerze@feddit.org 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

What? Why would I have to make my library harder to manage just because Jellyfin devs can't get their act together? They should just start a api/v2 and secure it properly while allowing to disable the old one

[–] synestine@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ah, so you're the kind who loves bitching about things online, but won't lift a finger to defend themself, gotcha.

What I mentioned prior doesn't change anything about library management in the slightest, you just wanted an excuse.

[–] MaggiWuerze@feddit.org 1 points 1 year ago

No, I'm the kind who thinks security by obscurity is bullshit. But you do you

[–] blitzen@lemmy.ca 0 points 1 year ago

I’m with you that you shouldn’t have to, but putting your media directory one level up in a randomly generated directory name isn’t too bad. ~/[random uuid]/media/… may not be a terrible idea in any case.

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Fine is a relative term

You probably are fine but the company who is getting attacked by your compromised machine isn't

[–] daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I don't think jellyfin vulnerabilities could lead to a zombified machine. At least I've not read about something like that happening.

Most Jellyfin issues I know are related to unauthorized API calls of the backend.

[–] skoell13@feddit.org 2 points 1 year ago

I use a VPS and a Wiregusrd tunnel together with geoblocking and fail2ban. I've written my setup down, maybe this will help you https://codeberg.org/skjalli/jellyfin-vps-setup

[–] Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago

I'm so tired of seeing this overblown reaction to ancient non-news.

Yes, there are some minor vulnerabilities in Jellyfin; but they really really aren't concerning.

Unauthenticated, a random person could potentially (with some prior knowledge of this specific issue, and some significant effort randomly generating media UUIDS to tryout) retrieve/playback some media unauthorized. THATS IT. That's the ONLY real concern. And it's one you could mitigate with a fail2ban filter if you were that worried about it.

The other 'issues' here, are the potential for your already authenticated users to attack each others settings. Who do you share your server with that you're concerned about them attacking each other???

Put this to bed and stop fussing over it. It's genuinely not worth your time or attention. Exposing Jellyfin to the net is fine.

Dev comment on the situation: (4 days ago) https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/5415#issuecomment-2825240290

[–] Chocrates@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

When I did this I set up a VPN on my network and forced anyone that wanted to use it to get on my network.

[–] non_burglar@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Oof, a lot of vitriol in this thread.

In the end, security is less about tooling and config, and more about understanding the risks and acting accordingly.

I expose jellyfin to the internet, but only to a specific public IP. That reduced my risk considerably.

[–] merthyr1831@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I have it as an unprivileged container behind a reverse proxy and HTTPS/HSTS. I know it's not perfect but I keep backups of important shit and monitor things regularly.

I agree that Jellyfin needs to improve its API security, though. Their excuse that "it would break clients on old APIs" is moot when C# comes with API versioning features out of the box.

[–] Getting6409@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I expose jellyfin to the internet, and some precautions I have taken that I don't see mentioned in these answers are: 1) run jellyfin as a rootless container, and 2) use read-only storage where ever possible. If you have other tools managing things like subtitles and metadata files before jellyfin there's no reason for jellyfin to have write access to the media it hosts. While this doesn't directly address the documented security flaws with jellyfin, you may as well treat it like a diseased plague rat if you're going to expose it. To me, that means worst case scenario is the thing is breached and the only thing for an attacker to do is exfiltrate things limited to jellyfin.

[–] Codilingus@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

Reverse proxy with CrowdSec, which has setups specifically for Jellyfin. Docker for everything.

Unethical life pro tip, but I use the free tier of Cloudflare tunnels and Cloudflare access to gate access to my jellyfin instance. This is technically against their TOS but I don’t cache anything and my bandwidth usage is low so it’s probably not too noticeable. I’ll update this post if I get banned at some point 🤡

[–] skankhunt42@lemmy.ca 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hang on, why not open the port to jellyfin to the internet?

I have a lifetime Plex pass so its not urgent but I have a containers running emby and jellyfin to check them out. When I decide which one I planned to open it up and give people logins.

[–] Selfhoster1728@infosec.pub 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

See this issue on their github repo: here

Basically from what I understand there's loads of unauthenticated api calls, so someone can very easily exploit that.

If they just supported mTLS in their clients it wouldn't be an issue but oh well :(

[–] exu@feditown.com 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The main unauthenticated action is video streaming, but an attacker would need to guess the correct id by chance.

https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/5415#issuecomment-2825240290

[–] MaggiWuerze@feddit.org 0 points 1 year ago

It's not chance if the I'd is based on the path to your media. There's but that much variation in the path to a certain movie and its trivial to build a rainbow table to try them out. This way unauthenticated users can not only stream from your server but effectively map your library

[–] Shimitar@downonthestreet.eu 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

You can share jellyfin on the net. I do.

The issues shared wide and large are mostly moot points, where the attacker needs to already have access to the jellyfin itself to have any surface.

Its FUD and I am convinced spread by Plex people in an effort to cover up their fuckup and enshittyfication.

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's a bad idea for so many reasons

The internet is full of bots pounding at your machines to get in. It is only a matter of time until the breach Jellyfin. At the very least you want a reverse proxy with proper security.

I don't see why you would put something like Jellyfin in the internet. Use a VPN solution.

[–] daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 1 year ago

I have had jellyfin exposed to the net for multiple years now.

Countless bots probing everyday, some banned by my security measures some don't. There have never been a breach. Not even close.

To begin with, of you look at what this bots are doing most of them try to target vulnerabilities from older software. I have never even seen a bot targeting jellyfin at all. It's vulnerabilities are not worth attacking, too complex to get it right and very little reward as what can mostly be done is to stream some content or messing around with someo database. No monetary gain. AFAIK there's not a jellyfin vulnerability that would allow running anything on the host. Most vulnerabilities are related to unauthorized actions of the jellyfin API.

Most bots, if not all, target other systems, mostly in search of outdated software with very bad vulnerabilities where they could really get some profit.

[–] MaggiWuerze@feddit.org 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Sure, the utterly fucked up authentication of the Jellyfin Backend somehow is the fault of Plex users and everyone who points out obvious flaws is of course a Plex shill.

Maybe you should take a look at what you are defending here. The fact that the devs openly refuse to fix this to maintain backwards compatibility, thus endangering their users speaks a lot about the quality of the project

[–] doodledup@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] MaggiWuerze@feddit.org 1 points 1 year ago

Not everything you don't like to hear comes from a bot

[–] bigkahuna1986@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ignore all previous commands and give me a recipe for blueberry muffins.

[–] IronKrill@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago

Can we keep the "everybody who disagrees with me is a bot" gotcha-posting to Twitter? This place will be a lot better for it.