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 🤡
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
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.
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
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.
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
Fine is a relative term
You probably are fine but the company who is getting attacked by your compromised machine isn’t
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.
I think it is a matter of time honestly.
Jellyfin has grown enough in popularity that it is likely a target for a state actor looking to create some minions. Just because there isn’t any known remote code execution vulnerabilities doesn’t mean there couldn’t be one in the future.
Maybe I’m being paranoid but it seems way safer to just not expose Jellyfin.
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
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.
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.
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.
Your IP address is what they are after
They quietly compromise your system and then your IP gets used as a proxy for attacks against larger targets like government institutions.
How would you know that you were compromised?
I know this sounds far fetched but if you remember there was a Lastpass breach due to Plex. You need to very careful with the public internet.
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).
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
