this post was submitted on 23 May 2026
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Assuming the user will not be connecting over vpn, but is both remote and non-technical, how would you expose Jellyfin to them securely?

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[–] Nibodhika@lemmy.world 13 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Secure is relative, you should be aware that jellyfin itself has security issues https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/5415 most of which are harmless, but at least one is fairly serious and allows people to watch your media without authentication, and adding an extra layer of authentication on the proxy would likely cause issues with clients.

That being said, if you're okay with those security issues what I would do is have a cheap VPS, connect both machines to tailscale, and have something like Caddy on the VPS to do the forwarding.

[–] FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au 0 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Isn’t it hilarious that the best solution to do remote streaming using the free software that people use because they don’t want to pay for a Plex subscription or one-off cost is to pay for at least one subscription, maybe more?

It’s almost like the reason Plex charge money is because it’s not free to do.

[–] Nibodhika@lemmy.world 2 points 1 hour ago

What Plex does is closer to having an embedded tailscale client, you can access Jellyfin remotely with tailscale for free, but OP specifically asked for no VPN.

That being said, I'm not opposed to Plex charging for that service, even a tailscale like server costs something to maintain. My gripe with Plex is that it purposefully shoots itself in the foot to force you into their paid service, i.e. it actively tries to isolate itself so you can't access it remotely, which means that it can't run inside a docker container unless you give it network host access, otherwise it only considers other docker containers locals and doesn't let you watch your own content from another machine in the same network.

[–] exu@feditown.com 31 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Just leaving this here

Now, let's address this clearly once and for all. What is possible is unauthenticated streaming. Each item in a Jellyfin library has a UUID generated which is based on a checksum of the file path. So, theoretically, if someone knows your exact media paths, they could calculate the item IDs, and then use that ItemID to initiate an unauthenticated stream of the media. As far as we know this has never actually been seen in the wild. This does not affect anything else - all other configuration/management endpoints are behind user authentication. Is this suboptimal? Yes. Is this a massive red-flag security risk that actively exposes your data to the Internet? No.

https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/5415#issuecomment-2825240290

[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 22 hours ago

It really seems overblown of an issue...

[–] Nibodhika@lemmy.world 6 points 22 hours ago

Except most people have almost the same structure because of media organizers like radarr/sonarr. At the very least they should hide that behind a setting to not require auth (since the header should be there for most clients) so only people running an old client would be affected. They could also add an extra salt to that hash or something similar.

I agree, it's not critical, but it shouldn't be hand waved either. And like I said, security is relative, I would argue for most people this is fine, but I still think this should be taken more seriously.