What’s your go too (secure) method for casting over the internet with a Jellyfin server.
I’m wondering what to use and I’m pretty beginner at this
this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2025
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My go to secure method is just putting it behind Cloudflare so people can’t see my IP, same as every other service. Nobody is gonna bother wasting time hacking into your home server in the hopes that your media library isn’t shit, when they can just pirate any media they want to watch themselves with no effort.
They absolutely will lol. It’s happening to you right now in fact. It’s not to consume your media, it’s just a matter of course when you expose something to the internet publicly.
And this is the start of the longest crypto nerd fight I've seen on Lemmy. Well done, people!
Not so much a fight as an exercise in futility lol
Well, I might as well put a dog in the fight. I'm considering my final, actually secure deployment of nextcloud.
This discussion has convinced me that a vpn is the only answer.
And almost everyone says wireguard.
K. Thats what I will build.
It’s not the only answer, but it’s the one that will get you the most secure with the least amount of effort.
What a bunch of B's. Sure your up gets probed it's happening to every ipv4 address all the time. But that is not hacking.
Anything you expose to the internet publicly will be attacked, just about constantly. Brute force attempts, exploit attempts, the whole nine. It is a ubiquitous and fundamental truth I’m afraid. If you think it’s not happening to you, you just don’t know enough about what you’re doing to realize.
You can mitigate it, but you can’t stop it. There’s a reason you’ll hear terms like “attack surface” used when discussing this stuff. There’s no “if” factor when it comes to being attacked. If you have an attack surface, it is being attacked.
Yup, the sad reality is that you don’t need to worry about the attacks you expect; You need to worry about the ones you don’t know anything about. Honeypots exist specifically to alert you that something has been breached.
Couple questions here.
What is a honeypot? I've only heard it in terms of piracy.
Also, what steps can someone take to reinforce this attack layer? You have an infograph or something people can google search their way through?
A honeypot is something that is intentionally left available, to alert you when it gets hit. In practice, they’re just a tool to tell security specialists when they need to start worrying; They wouldn’t be used by the average user at all.
The goal is to build your security like layers, and ideally have all of your services behind the secure walls. Between these layers, you have honeypots. If someone gets through your first layer of security but hits the honeypot, you know someone is sniffing around, or maybe has an exploit for your outer layer that you need to research. If they get through the second layer and hit your second honeypot, you know that someone is specifically targeting you (instead of simply running automated scans) and you need to pay closer attention. Etc…
Reinforcing the attack layer comes in two main forms, which work in tandem: Strengthening the actual layer, and reducing attack vectors. The first is focused on using strong passwords, keeping systems up to date, running something like Fail2Ban for services that are exposed, etc… The goal is for each layer of security to be robust, to reduce the chances of a bot attack actually working. Bots will simply sniff around and automatically throw shit at the wall to see if anything sticks.
The second part is focused on identifying and mitigating attack vectors. Essentially reducing the amount of holes in the wall. It doesn’t matter how strong the wall is if it’s full of holes for your server’s various services. The goal is typically to have each layer be as solid as possible, and grant access to the layers below it. So for instance, running a VPN. The VPN gets you access to the network, without exposing services externally. In order to access your services, they need to get through the VPN first, making the VPN the primary attack vector. So you can focus on ensuring that the VPN is secure, instead of trying to spread your focus amongst a dozen different services. If it’s exposed to the open internet, it is a new potential attack vector; The strength of the wall doesn’t actually matter, if one of those services has an exploit that someone can use to get inside your network.
Home users really only need to worry about things like compromised services, but corporate security specialists also focus on things like someone talking their way past the receptionist and into the server room, USB sticks getting “lost” around the building and plugged into random machines by curious employees, etc… All of these are attack vectors, even if they’re not digital. If you have three or four layers of security in a corporate setting and your third or fourth honeypot gets hit, you potentially have some corporate spy wrist-deep in your server room.
For an easy example, imagine having a default password on a service, and then exposing it to the internet via port forwarding. It doesn’t matter how strong your firewall is anymore. The bot will simply sniff the service’s port, try the default credentials, and now it has control of that service.
The better way to do it would be to reduce your attack vectors at each layer; Require the VPN to access the network via a secure connection, then have a strong password on the service so it can’t easily be compromised.
@EncryptKeeper That’s my experience. Zombied home computers are big business. The networks are thousands of computers. I had a hacker zombie my printer(!) maybe via an online fax connection and it/they then proceeded to attack everything else on my network. One older machine succumbed before I could lock everything down.
No, people are probing it right now. But looking at the logs, nobody has ever made it through. And I run a pretty basic setup, just Cloudflare and Authelia hooking into an LDAP server, which powers Jellyfin. Somebody who invests a little more time than me is probably a lot safer. Tailscale is nice, but it’s overkill for most people, and the majority of setups I see posted here are secure enough to stop any random scanning that happens across them, if not dedicated attention.
No, they are actively trying to get in right now. If you have Authelia exposed they’re brute forcing it. They’re actively trying to exploit vulnerabilities that exist in whatever outwardly accessible software you’re exposing is, and in many cases also in software you’re not even using in scattershot fashion. Cloudflare is blocking a lot of the well known CVEs for sure, so you won’t see those hit your server logs. If you look at your Authelia logs you’ll see the login attempts though. If you connect via SSH you’ll see those in your server logs.
You’re mitigating it, sure. But they are absolutely 100% trying to get into your server right now, same as everyone else. There is no consideration to whether you are a self hosted or a Fortune 500 company.
No, they aren't. Just to be sure, I just checked it, and out of the over 2k requests made to the Authelia login page in the last 24 hours, none have made it to the login page itself. You don't know jack shit about what's going on in another persons network, so I'm not sure why you're acting like some kind of expert.
Yes they are. The idea that they’re not would be a statistical wonder.
Are you logging into your Authelia login page 2k times a day? If not, I suspect that some (most) of those are malicious lol.
It’s the internet, not your network. And I’m well aware of how the internet works. What you’re trying to argue here is like arguing that there’s no possible way that I know your part of the earth revolves around the sun. Unless you’re on a different internet from the rest of us, you’re subject to the same behavior. I mean I guess I didn’t ask if you were hosting your server in North Korea but since you’re posting here, I doubt it.
Well I am an expert with over a decade of experience in cybersecurity, but I’m not acting like an expert here, I’m acting like somebody with at least a rudimentary understanding of how these things work.
Guess I’m a wonder then. I’ve always thought of myself as pretty wonderful, I’m glad to hear you agree.
That’s 2k requests made. None of them were served. Try to keep up.
Then I guess I should get a career in cybersecurity, because I obviously know more than someone with over a decade of supposed experience. If you were worth whatever your company is paying you in wages, you would know that a rule blocking connections from other countries, and also requiring the request for the login page come from one of the services on your domain, will block virtually all malicious attempts to access your services. Such a rule doesn’t work for a public site, but for a selfhosted setup it’s absolutely an easy option to reduce your bandwidth usage and make your setup far more secure.
Whoa whoa whoa. What malicious attempts?
You just told me you were the statistical wonder that nobody is bothering attack?
So those 2k requests were not you then? They were hostile actors attempting to gain unauthorized access to your services?
Well there we have it folks lmao
I said it would block all malicious attempts. I didn't say the people trying to access my services were malicious. Clearly the OP is worried about that. I however, having just the meager experience of, you know, actually fucking running the a Jellyfin server, am not. But I'm also not trying convince people I'm a smug cybersecurity expert with a decade of experience.
As OP should be. 2k attempts a day at unauthorized access to your services is a pretty clear indicator of that. Seems you’ve mitigated it well enough, why would you suggest that OP not bother doing the same? If you’re so convinced those 2k attempts are not malicious, then go ahead and remove those rules if they’re unnecessary.
Perhaps as someone with only meager experience running a Jellyfin server who can’t even recognize malicious traffic to their server, and zero understanding of the modern internet threat landscape, you shouldn’t be spreading misinformation that’s potentially damaging to new selfhosters?
If you were any good at reading, you would know that I said those rules protect the Authelia login page. They don't protect the Jellyfin service or its login page at all. The Jellyfin instance is not behind anything except Cloudflare. I stated that in my very first message. Removing those rules would have no effect whatsoever on Jellyfin.
It’s over man. You’ve made it very clear you have no idea what you’re talking about, how any of this works, or even what’s going on with your own selfhosted services. Back peddling away from your own arguments and trying to sweep up the beans you’ve already spilled isn’t going to help your case.
Maybe stick to your day job, I just don’t think that cybersecurity career is in the cards for you.
Yeah, some random nobody trying to convince people they're a cybersecurity expert is gonna be what shuts me up.
I very clearly laid out my setup, and how you were wrong. If you can't even read well enough to understand that, let alone form som kind of actual argument backed up by reality, that isn't my problem to deal with.
I would say stick to your own day job, but if this is actually your day job then maybe check out whether your local Burger King has openings, you'll do less harm there.
You’ve argued from a position of weakness against a well known and accepted truth, and have provided zero proof to back up your outlandish claim. On the contrary you’ve admitted to the existence of unwanted access attempts to your services, as well as your usage of mitigations to the same problem you insist doesn’t exist.
It’s over man. You’re certified expert yapper but that’s not going to convince me or anyone else here that you know what you’re talking about. It’s a wrap.
Is this Reddit? When were we supposed to be seeking the validation of random strangers on the net, especially ones who brag about their bona fides like it's a CoD lobby? You keep saying it's over, but for some reason you keep coming back here to try to get the last word. If I'm in a position of weakness, why is it you're the one trying so hard? You're in a dick measuring contest against yourself. I'm getting second-hand embarrassment.