Assuming the user will not be connecting over vpn, but is both remote and non-technical, how would you expose Jellyfin to them securely?
You can do a reverse proxy + authelia (or other auth service). It’s still more risky than a VPN IMO, buts wayyyy better than some of the other options in this thread
The biggest problem with that Jellyfin to this day is that you can’t.
Seems like every new open source selfhosted app implements OIDC compatibility, but for some reason, I can only assume is technical debt, Jellyfin hasn’t.
What exactly about jellyfin makes this oidc style access more difficult to manage?
To be totally honest I’m not sure you can harden jellyfin enough for public Internet exposure without also breaking basic functionality of the platform.
This is why everyone is always pushing so hard for a VPN/Tailnet of some kind. The public internet is a bit to much of a wild west to be exposing arbitrary services to it unless you really know what you’re doing.
Put Jellyfin and a reverse proxy in an isolated vlan or DMZ, with no ability to reach into your lan at all and everyone connects in the same way. Its just movies, thats all you lose if it gets hacked. Set up some monitoring too in case it becomes a botnet node so you can destroy it and start over.
My use cases are:
- Connect from multiple devices on the same home network (with the application)
- Connect from a phone device on the internet (with the application)
- Connect from some PC’s and devices on the internet (with the application and from web browser)
For home networked devices, I don’t care about security that much. I try to lock it down on the router level and by using VLANs for less secure devices. I connect via IP directly (or .local domain).
Jellyfin runs under its own user with read access to a media library.
For devices on the internet, I have jellyfin exposed on a specific url path of my domain - through a reverse proxy all through 443. A bit of security through obscurity here. I’m proxied through cloudflare on the DNS side with very restrictive IP rules.
I think this is enough for the security flaws jellyfin does have. I’d sleep better at night if it had client certificate support, but Its not a big deal imo. If security flaws allowing remote code execution are found, I’ll shut it down and allow access through wireguard only and lose access from some devices on the internet where I cant use VPNs. Not a bit deal either.Cloudflare. Just make sure to disable caching
How do you get the mobile app to connect?
I just type the URL
I have Cloudflare set up without Auth. Just region locked to my country
So it’s just a solid reverse proxy with a bunch of features and an added layer with white listing.
I know whitelisting isn’t security per say but it’s good enough
Idk if geo whitelisting is really good enough. I can’t speak for OP, but I’m in the same position and I don’t. I had high hopes for the post but everyone seems to just brush over the “secure” part
What are you afraid of?
My jellyfin runs in a a rootless podman container
I’m afraid of security bugs in the software I’m using, so that containers don’t contain, read-only doesn’t prevent writing, mounting directories doesn’t restrict access to those directories, etc.
I’m a nobody, I can’t imagine anyone targeting me or my random domain, but I can imagine getting swept up in a net of attacks of opportunities targeting hosted software with known vulnerabilities, or injected supply chain vulnerabilities, so I want to reduce my attack surface as much as I can (while still actually letting the people I want to access it actually access it)
Then don’t expose anything on the internet
If client certificates and basic auth is not supported by jellyfin:
- reverse proxy
- strong random subdomain
- wildcard certificate
- tls1.3 only
- doh/dot only
1-3 make random scanners unable to find your service, 4&5 even hide it from your ISP. Dot/doh service will still know your subdomain, so be your own dot/doh ! :D
I’m no expert, but an unguessible URL path is similar but not visible to DNS. Could do both.
I’m kinda disappointed with this thread, I’m in a similar position to OP, but all the responses are just like “use a reverse proxy and make your URL hard to guess” and other measures which are not very secure. \
It seems like that’s about as good as you can get at the moment, because the mobile apps barf if you try to add in auth in front of the reverse proxy, but a lot of people seem to be providing this advice like it’s good enough rather than as good as you can get.
Well yeah, the “good as you can get” answers are “use a VPN” or “don’t”.
As others have mentioned, a reverse proxy, like nginx or caddy. These are web servers, so you need to configure it or an app that runs in it. May I shill: Nginx Proxy Manager (NPM).
Another way:
Expose using caddy. Use basic auth for the web UI only. This exempts the Jellyfin app clients from basic auth that they don’t support but requires it before anyone even gets to the Jellyfin UI. This obfuscates the fact that your endpoint is even a Jellyfin end point.
How can I do that? I’d love to have better security for my jellyfin but I risk breaking the apps.
A reverse proxy is what you are looking for. I recommend Caddy.
You’ll also need a domain, but they can be had for very cheap.
Run the jellyfin in a container that only has read privileges to the videos ( make sure you can’t get out to your whole NAS from there), put that behind a Cloudflaired tunnel.
It’s not technically secure, but if they can’t get a foothold in your network and the only thing they can access is your video catalog, that’s a reasonable amount of risk.
Just make sure you disable caching or it can be a bit slow
Gotta be careful with cloudflared and media. They can block you if they detect copyrighted materials, even if it’s your own DVDs. You can setup TLS certs so the traffic is at least encrypted
If your American, ripping your own DVD’s still isn’t legal.
Right. Which is why Cloudflared would block you if it’s detected. But regardless, if for whatever reason, you ended up in court for the content you copied, the judge would probably give you a low fine. Obviously not legal advice, but the US justice system doesn’t have time to care about people making digital copies of DVDs they’ve purchased.
It’s irrelevant anyway, since none of us are just copying our own DVDs… But for legal reasons /s
Ask them to visit https://ipv4.icanhazip.com/ and give you back the number, then whitelist in your webserver, as well as your LAN/VPN range, deny rest. Explain they can only reach jellyfin from their home internet. Repeat if they get 403 forbidden after they get a new WAN IP.
That or VPN like openziti, wireguard but gets more complicated.
You really can’t assume your visitors are going to have static IPs.
What happens when they visit from their phone? A friend’s WiFi? Their home connection that has a regularly changing IP?
It’s exactly what it sounds like.
I like how if it’s IPv6 it just gives up
This is solid. I wonder if you could rig up a ddns somehow to keep it seamless?
Perhaps (and I know I might be weird) running pangolin on something like hetzner? (Which I do)
This is the way I do it with services. Has auth. Rules for access per service. Handles reverse proxy. And can integrate crowdsec. Not a security guru…
Pangolin?
Pangolin reverse proxy https://github.com/fosrl/pangolin
For a remote and non-technical user I would say IP whitelisting offers a decent tradeoff.
On your end you expose your jellyfin port to internet, but restrict at the router level to your user’s client IP address as soon as you have it. Obviously in practice this works best if the address does not change often.
Also not as ideal if their ISP uses CGNAT. Still waaay better than fully open, but you would be giving access to many households
Yep, that’s why I call that a tradeoff. Far from perfect and yet so much better than nothing.
Pros:
- Likely cuts 99.99% of attacks.
- Nothing to do on client’s end.
Cons:
- Whitelisting must be updated everytime the client address changes.
- Not 100% bulletproof as operators (notably for mobile networks) can NAT multiple connections behind a single publicly addressable IPv4 address.
- Also IP addresses can be spoofed but I doubt that would be a major concern here.
Is there a way to this with like a MAC address instead of an IP? Allowing specific devices (my parents have a Firestick that they travel with) would be pretty ideal.
No, not for remote access over the internet.
