They also forgot to change r/selfhosted from when they posted it to reddit… https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1ter9n9/refearnapp_opensource_selfhosted_affiliate/

As well as: https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1sk4oqw/refearnapp_selfhosted_opensource_affiliate/

Here’s their answers to “Expand the replies to this comment to learn how AI was used in this post/project”:

it is written by ai i give the idea then ai writes that

this post is written by ai. i only give it thought on what idea it should post and it generated everything.

Their post history contains a mixture of comments with grammar like the above as well as many comments with excellent grammar, often containing em dashes. It seems like they only post on Reddit using AI comments to karma farm so they can spam AI generated posts like this to try to get some people to pay for their hosting subscription for their vibe coded app.

I think you should make it clearer in this post that you are selling hosting services for this. It feels like this is self promotion but without transparency otherwise.

It sounds like it, on the homepage there’s a joke about prompting ai to build this

Maybe you should state it in the first sentence of the post as well. I didn’t know it was even paid or closed source until I got to the bottom.

Idk about giving a comprehensive answer, but getting full marks on the nextcloud security scanner is a good start: https://scan.nextcloud.com/

I check mine periodically and make sure I’m on the latest version, use 2fa (passkey) and hope that does the trick.

Also there’s a plugin for brute force protection.

Yes that’s what I would like to advocate for. I did something similar with LunaSea, but often people suggest doing that with Jellyfin and are not aware that almost no apps support it, and that adding exceptions for the API makes you basically as secure as not having it. But people tend to get very defensive when you try to tell them that something won’t work, so I try to phrase it as a question to see if I can get them to understand what the limitations are in a way that’s less confrontational.

Yeah that’s fair and I think that’s a good move, my point is just that people are acting like this is not feasible to exploit. I’m at the point in my exploit testing excursion where I have a script that can generate a stream of potential IDs based on real torrent names being parsed and reformatted using radarr’s default naming pattern as well as the commonly used trash guides ones permuted with some common library paths used in the default docker compose examples, and it’s turning up actual ID matches with my jellyfin instance. All I have left to do is make it create API requests to test the IDs against the unauthenticated API instead of checking an exported list and there’s a proof of concept. 5 years is a long time for someone to figure that out.

That’s exactly the point I’m getting at. Putting an auth wall doesn’t work with many apps, and if you add exceptions to the API then you’re not really protecting anything.

What do you mean viable? The web UI is just an app that is delivered to your browser, it makes more or less the same API requests as an app would make, so IDK why the risk would be lower with an app?

If an attacker can access the login endpoint for example to brute force or dictionary attack, it doesn’t matter if the web UI is or isn’t accessible if the login endpoint it uses is exposed for an app. The attacker could serve their own copy of the web UI and proxy requests to the API your app connects to. Blocking the html from being served doesn’t make a difference.

Do you not do any renaming? That probably would make it even easier as you can just brute force with a database of filenames scraped from torrents. I already have a proof of concept that generates valid jellyfin IDs from any given file path, it only takes a few more steps before you can plug in a shodan scan of jellyfin instances and just shotgun a bunch of IDs generated from torrents.csv at them and find stuff you can stream without authentication.

People not bothering to rename, using the default radarr naming scheme, or everyone using the same naming pattern from trash guides just makes it easier.

Probably the only way to guarantee nobody can probe your media and stream it without authentication is to make sure to rename everything using a format that only you use or mount all your media under a path inside docker that contains a long randomly generated folder prefix.

Gotcha yeah, I did this for LunaSea with traefik forward auth for the arrs, but the lack of support in jellyfin clients is annoying. Though personally I’ve been waiting 5 years for Findroid to support transcoded streams / adjusting video quality so personally that’s higher on my list of priorities.

I do around 0.75tb per day, so like 22 per month. A lot of that is probably seeding and streaming as 90% of it is upload.

Gotcha I see, just checking if I missed something since that was the issue last time I tried doing something like that. These days I just yolo it and expose jellyfin to the public Internet.

Yeah not only would a lot of people have the same media name, because of docker mounts, probably a lot of people have the same path to the media inside of the docker container even if the external location is different. I bet you could make a rainbow table of sorts of the most popular movie/TV torrents combined with the most common place in the container for media to be mounted, then use shodan to get a list of hundreds of instances that you could scan for the common hashes.

I’m just seeing the issue for the first time and noticed it was raised 5 years ago - surely that was enough time to at least put forward a changeover date and give clients time to update.

Wait so if you’re gonna allow access without authentication then why bother putting pangolin in front of jellyfin? Does it help in some other kind of way? I don’t really get how it helps without interfering with apps accessing jellyfin.

How do you get apps through something like that? Do you have to open your browser and hit the URL periodically to handle auth there and it just remembers your IP?

For starters, it being brought up wouldn’t be an issue if there was some timeline to fix it and the response wasn’t just “it’s too hard and would break clients”, and secondly, I think it’s not congruent with wanting to improve jellyfin if your reflex is immediately to say that nothing is truly secure. Could you imagine if next cloud had a similar issue and put it off for more than 5(?) years?? Is that really not enough time to get the clients and apps in order? They should just put the issue to rest so we can move on with making jellyfin better. I don’t think anyone wants it to remain an issue for another 5 years, and I think calling that blown out of proportion is kinda ridiculous.

Like if 5 years ago they said you have 5 years to update your app, we could have had this issue checked off and nobody would be able to complain about it or use it as an excuse not to switch, so the next best time to set a deadline would be now. They should just as soon as possible say you have a couple years to update your apps, at least schedule a date years in the future to rip off the bandaid instead of kicking it further down the road.

Sure not knowing of an issue doesn’t mean it’s secure, but that doesn’t also mean that projects with known issues aren’t a problem… Like if you want jellyfin to be popular you should want this to be fixed - I don’t get this attitude from people who main jellyfin who seem opposed to pushing for it to be better. It not being a big issue is your own personal opinion - it’s obvious that known security issues sitting around for a long time bothers a lot of people so the sooner it gets addressed, the fewer reasons people have to stick with Plex. That’s a good thing right?

Ok, well you just made it sound like the main issue was the lack of audit /guarantee and not an actual security issue. I don’t think breaking clients is an excuse not to at least get started putting forward a date, even if it’s a year in the future, where clients need to be updated by. Sure Overseeer isn’t begging people to put it on the internet, but there aren’t any known vulnerabilities to my knowledge, same with vaultwarden. Imo it’s a big win to getting more people comfortable using jellyfin if they can put their foot down and say clients need to update, or stay on the old version. Every time there’s Plex drama, it seems like the list of reasons people don’t want to spend time to migrate isn’t getting whittled down much. I’ve donated hundreds of dollars over the years at this point to jellyfin proper as well as several clients hoping things could move faster. Like imagine if the Overseeer devs designed a frontend. There’s nothing that jellyfin can’t technically do that I find missing, but it feels like a death by a thousand cuts.

How come this is not an issue for other projects then? Why isn’t Overseer also saying "don’t host this publicly because we can’t also can’t guarantee perfect security? Is the issue really just that they can’t prove security or is there an actual security issue with the API? From what you’re saying it sounds like the only issue is that they haven’t done an audit but that it’s otherwise fine, but other people are saying there are actual security holes regardless of whether an audit is performed.

Like, I’m fine running stuff publicly that hasn’t been audited like most of the stuff I self host. Why are people treating jellyfin differently than other self hosted projects that haven’t been audited?