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
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Most bots, if not all, target other systems, mostly in search of outdated software with very bad vulnerabilities where they could really get some profit.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.
IP addresses are fairly public.
In order to get that kind of infection there need to be a serious vulnerability. None of the services I expose have those kind of vulnerabilities, and I keep them updated.
A Zero-day may be possible, but it can happen with any software.
Any way, even if some of my services got infected that way, I have them all in docker containers. If they managed somehow to insert any malicious software it would have disappeared in the next restart of the container.
And in order to have a software that breaks out of the container it would need to also have some sort of zero-day docker exploit. Two zero-days needed for accomplish that…
Every expose software I have is running on a caddy reverse proxy. And caddy is the only authorized author on my firewall so it gets more difficult to try to run an unexpected malicious software through it.