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 🤡
this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2025
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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
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
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.
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
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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.
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.
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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).
The password is totally irrelevant for the most part. The worst case is that they get access to the dashboard
The problem is when major security vulnerabilities are found like remote code execution
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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.
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.
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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 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
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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.
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
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