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Sharing Jellyfin (poptalk.scrubbles.tech)

submitted 5 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

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 🤡

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 days 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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 days 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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days 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.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 days 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

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days 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.

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