Sharing Jellyfin
Sharing Jellyfin
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
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 🤡
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.
This. Just setup fail2ban or similar in front of Jellyfin and you'll be fine.
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
Fine is a relative term
You probably are fine but the company who is getting attacked by your compromised machine isn't
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.
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
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.
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.
The internet is full of bots pounding at your machines to get in. It is only a matter of time until the breach Jellyfin.
If you are talking about brute force attacks for your password, then use a good password.. and something like fail2ban to block ips that are spamming you.
This point doesn't exactly match, but: public services like google auth don't require users use vpns. They have a lot more money to keep stuff secure, but you may see my point.. auth isn't too trivial of a feature to keep secure nowadays. They implement similar protections, something to block spammers and make users have good passwords (if you dont use a good password, you are still vulnerable on any service).
I love Jellyfin and use it. I also think the security issues are very serious and it's irresponsible to not fix them. At the very least they can make a new API and give users the option to enable or disable the insecure one until clients get updated. But they don't.
I've decided to remove public access to my Jellyfin server until it's resolved, though it's still accessible behind my VPN.
I also think Plex probably has open vulns and it's also a more known target. The nail that sticks out furthest gets nailed down.
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
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.
How does that work with Roku/smart TVs?
Probably doesn't. Might need to use the router to get the whole network on th vpn
They could route it though a different device
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.
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
There are two routes. VPN and VPS.
VPN; setup wireguard and offer services to your wireguard network.
VPS; setup a VPS to act as a reverse proxy for your jellyfin instance.
Each have their own perks. Each have their own caveats.
The VPS would still involve exposing it
You're exposing your jellyfin instance to a single IP, your VPS. That's what a reverse proxy is.
You block all communication from any IP but local, and your VPS IP from jellyfin, and forward web traffic from your VPS to your jellyfin instance. It's not the same as exposing your jellyfin instance directly. Not sure why I have to explain that...but here we are, I guess.
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.
I do. I run it behind a caddy service so it's secured with an SSL. The port is running on a high non standard one. I do keep checking access logs but haven't had a peep apart from the 1 person I shared it with
That port changing stuff is way outdated and hasn't been effective for a long time.
A quick scan will show it ofcourse. But it stops bots and stuff just hitting "known" ports. I've not had any issues in the months it's been active compared to the previous month's I just used the standard port
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.
I don't do this, but I would set up oAuth like Authelia or something behind a reverse-proxy and authenticate Jellyfin clients through that.
that's what I'd like personally, but I don't think the clients would play nice with that
They are out of luck if using the Android TV client but web browser should be fine
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.
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 :(
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
That wouldn't even be using TLS
Bad idea
You could probably set up a cloudflare tunnel. I forget what they call it. I think technically sending video through it is against their TOS but if just a few friends and family are using it I doubt you will hit their naughty list.
I've heard mixed responses about how sensitive they are about routing video through their service. I've heard some people are just fine running jellyfin/Plex while others get shut down from routing a security system through it.
I've used it about 2 years now. I have both Jellyfin and even had Invidious for a while. I don't even know it was against any terms until right now.
Reverse proxy with CrowdSec, which has setups specifically for Jellyfin. Docker for everything.
Now that's interesting, what is the purpose of the reverse proxy, don't you still need something exposed then?
I just expose it to the internet.
What could possibly go wrong
Netbird/Tailscale
You also could use Wireguard as it is a p2p protocol by default.
If you have IPv6 access you could put in on a IPv6 address
I share Jellyfin.
Behind a Reverse Proxy with 2FA that breaks client support.
So only web browser :)I've been making people use VPN, but that's been a huge barrier to entry. I'm in the process of switching to IP allow list in traefik.