Please take this discussion to this post: https://lemmy.ml/post/28376589
Main content
Selfhosting is always a dilemma in terms of security for a lot of reasons. Nevertheless, I have one simple goal: selfhost a Jellyfin instance in the most secure way possible. I don’t plan to access it anywhere but home.
TL;DR
I want the highest degree of security possible, but my hard limits are:
- No custom DNS
- Always-on VPN
- No self-signed certificates (unless there is no risk of MITM)
- No external server
Full explanation
I want to be able to access it from multiple devices, so it can’t be a local-only instance.
I have a Raspberry Pi 5 that I want to host it on. That means I will not be hosting it on an external server, and I will only be able to run something light like securecore rather than something heavy like Qubes OS. Eventually I would like to use GrapheneOS to host it, once Android’s virtual machine management app becomes more stable.
It’s still crazy to me that 2TB microSDXC cards are a real thing.
I would like to avoid subscription costs such as the cost of buying a domain or the cost of paying for a VPN, however I prioritize security over cost. It is truly annoying that Jellyfin clients seldom support self-signed certificates, meaning the only way to get proper E2EE is by buying a domain and using a certificate authority. I wouldn’t want to use a self-signed certificate anyways, due to the risk of MITM attacks. I am a penetration tester, so I have tested attacks by injecting malicious certificates before. It is possible to add self-signed certificates as trusted certificates for each system, but I haven’t been able to get that to work since it seems clients don’t trust them anyways.
Buying a domain also runs many privacy risks, since it’s difficult to buy domains without handing over personal information. I do not want to change my DNS, since that risks browser fingerprinting if it differs from the VPN provider. I always use a VPN (currently ProtonVPN) for my devices.
If I pay for ProtonVPN (or other providers) it is possible to allow LAN connections, which would help significantly, but the issue of self-signed certificates still lingers.
With that said, it seems my options are very limited.
If you’re running externally, use a cloudflare tunnel.
No ports exposed = no attack surface. This is 99% of security.
HTTPS is provided by CF although only secures comms between your devices to CF, not CF to your Pi, meaning CF can see clear text technically.
If that’s not good enough then use a VPN server like PiVPN and put it on your pi and OpenVPN on your devices. *This has nothing to do with paid VPN Client subscriptions like Tunnelbear or Proton or whatever. *
You will be running a VPN server on your pi to which you will connect from your devices on which you want to watch JF by downloading a device profile to your devices and opening it in the OpenVPN app.
You do not need to pay for anything at all anywhere ever (other than something for DDNS and a domain name), use a strong password and make sure your JF is updated if there’s any CVE. Expose nothing else to the internet.
You don’t even need HTTPS at that point or any certs, a VPN will encrypt your traffic anyway. The only cleartext you’ll have is between your VPN and your JF, and if both are on the pi then the only MITM vector is literally inside your Pi which is unlikely to have any issues.
