At the very minimum stick a reverse proxy in front like caddy, nginx, or Traefik. Then have some middleware like crowdsec to inspect what's going on. Then whitelist the IP or the country IP block.

There is much more but those would be the bare minimum.

Possibly mTLS, which you'd configure in your reverse proxy. You could email them the certificate and instructions on installing it. I believe for Chromium browsers on Windows you basically just double click the cert and click through the wizard. Firefox I know has a thing in the settings for importing the cert. Android you just tap on the cert and make sure it opens with 'Certificate Installer' if it gives you the option.

The biggest problem with that Jellyfin to this day is that you can’t.

Seems like every new open source selfhosted app implements OIDC compatibility, but for some reason, I can only assume is technical debt, Jellyfin hasn’t.

For a remote and non-technical user I would say IP whitelisting offers a decent tradeoff.

On your end you expose your jellyfin port to internet, but restrict at the router level to your user's client IP address as soon as you have it. Obviously in practice this works best if the address does not change often.

To be totally honest I'm not sure you can harden jellyfin enough for public Internet exposure without also breaking basic functionality of the platform.

This is why everyone is always pushing so hard for a VPN/Tailnet of some kind. The public internet is a bit to much of a wild west to be exposing arbitrary services to it unless you really know what you're doing.

Ask them to visit https://ipv4.icanhazip.com/ and give you back the number, then whitelist in your webserver, as well as your LAN/VPN range, deny rest. Explain they can only reach jellyfin from their home internet. Repeat if they get 403 forbidden after they get a new WAN IP.

That or VPN like openziti, wireguard but gets more complicated.

if theyre close, add them to your tailscale, if not and you have a web serve, use a reverse proxy.

for tailscale, you'd probably have to walk them through setting it up but then its one and done

Depends on what you mean by "secure." My personal setup is Jellyfin LXC on proxmox --> Wireguard to VPS -> Nginx reverse proxy on VPS.

This setup relies somewhat on Jellyfin's auth, but I'm comfortable with that risk. The LXC is blocked from sending local traffic on my network by firewall rules. Yes, someone could exploit a vulnerability in Jellyfin (though looking through the CVEs I'm not overly worried about that), then escape the LXC and fuck with my server. But that's a lot of work for no profit.

For more protection (in sense of reducing traffic that even interacts with your server), I'd recommend getting a wildcard cert for the domain so that the actual subdomain jellyfin is on is undisclosed to anyone not using your service.

Security isn't about making everything impregnable, it's about making attacks more trouble than they're worth. Otherwise, we'd all live in fortified bunkers surrounded by landmines. 🙃

Run the jellyfin in a container that only has read privileges to the videos ( make sure you can't get out to your whole NAS from there), put that behind a Cloudflaired tunnel.

It's not technically secure, but if they can't get a foothold in your network and the only thing they can access is your video catalog, that's a reasonable amount of risk.

call me crazy but I just use a couldflare tunnel since my domain is already provided through them. They make it really easy to add sub-domains attached to specific ports on the local machine and automatically adds the proper DNS entries. Additionally they have a ton of domain security/anti-bot measures you can set up.

I agree with the folks saying reverse proxy of some kind + WAF. That way end users don’t have to deal with the VPN, but your home system is not directly exposed.

I’ve been doing something similar with SSH local port forwarding and a $5/month VPS. Haven’t come anywhere close to my network quotas, and performance has not been an issue for home use with 2-5 concurrent users most of the time. I forward the local caddy ports to unprivileged ports/user on the VPS, then use the firewall on the VPS to forward that port to 443 and lock down the rest.

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.

You can do a reverse proxy + authelia (or other auth service). It's still more risky than a VPN IMO, buts wayyyy better than some of the other options in this thread

Why no VPN?

best practice states security through obscurity is not to be relied upon, but compare ssh logs after one year on the default port vs a non-standard port and you'll immediately see why you want to use a non-standard https port for non-professional services. it cuts 99.9% of the noise/attempts.

I agree with reverse proxy + middleware. I’d also suggest something like Jellyswarm as the front end. That way I can connect to other friends’ servers too.

Set up a reverse proxy with https always on. And get a good (physical) firewall, preferably something akin to opnsense, pfsense, openwrt. Exposing is always a risk, and if you do want it, you have to bear the responsibility for your own security. Keep things up to date, set up monitoring and a good logging system (Wazuh) comes to mind.

Exposure means a security risk. How you deal with that security risk is your choice.

Cloudflare and the likes forbid usage of their stuff for these things.

Perhaps (and I know I might be weird) running pangolin on something like hetzner? (Which I do)

If they could be using web UI (I'm not sure how a client would work with auth like that) then it kind of depends on how much hassle they can live with and how secure you want to be

Simplest would be to use https://doc.traefik.io/traefik/reference/routing-configuration/http/middlewares/basicauth/
You set up username and password and share those with the user. But it can be brute-forced

Something more secure but also a bit more demanding would be some kind of email otp
https://docs.goauthentik.io/add-secure-apps/flows-stages/stages/authenticator_email/
Set up authentik to send time-limited link to their email that well let them through. But they would have to authenticate every time they access

Another way:

Expose using caddy. Use basic auth for the web UI only. This exempts the Jellyfin app clients from basic auth that they don’t support but requires it before anyone even gets to the Jellyfin UI. This obfuscates the fact that your endpoint is even a Jellyfin end point.

Not at all, there's legal risk if you're hosting your blurays. Cloudflare even explicitly forbids such use. VPN or nothing imo.

Reverse proxy with fail2ban or crowdsec. It's possible to set up things like Pangolin which ultimately use a VPN between external and internal access points but not at the client, though it takes more setup if you want to use apps over pangolin instead of just the browser.

A reverse proxy is what you are looking for. I recommend Caddy.

You’ll also need a domain, but they can be had for very cheap.