this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2025
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I already host multiple services via caddy as my reverse proxy. Jellyfin, I am worried about authentication. How do you secure it?

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago (4 children)

I use good ol' obscurity. My reverse proxy requires that the correct subdomain is used to access any service that I host and my domain has a wildcard entry. So if you access asdf.example.com you get an error, the same for directly accessing my ip, but going to jellyfin.example.com works. And since i don't post my valid urls anywhere no web-scraper can find them. This filters out 99% of bots and the rest are handled using authelia and crowdsec

[–] [email protected] 1 points 12 hours ago

If you're using jellyfin as the url, that's an easily guessable name, however if you use random words not related to what's being hosted chances are less, e.g. salmon.example.com . Also ideally your server should reply with a 200 to * subdomains so scrappers can't tell valid from invalid domains. Also also, ideally it also sends some random data on each of those so they don't look exactly the same. But that's approaching paranoid levels of security.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

That’s not how web scrappers work lol. No such thing as obscurity except for humans

[–] [email protected] 1 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

It seems to that it works. I don't get any web-scrapers hitting anything but my main domain. I can't find any of my subdomains on google.

Please tell me how you believe that it works. Maybe i overlooked something...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago

My understanding is that scrappers check every domain and subdomain. You’re making it harder but not impossible. Everything gets scrapped

It would be better if you also did IP whitelisting, rate limiting to prevent bots, bot detection via cloudflare or something similar, etc.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago

Are you using HTTPS? It's highly likely that your domains/certificates are being logged for certificate transparency. Unless you're using wildcard domains, it's very easy to enumerate your sub-domains.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

And since i don't post my valid urls anywhere no web-scraper can find them

You would ah... be surprised. My urls aren't published anywhere and I currently have 4 active decisions and over 300 alerts from crowdsec.

It's true none of those threat actors know my valid subdomains, but that doesn't mean they don't know I'm there.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Of course i get a bunch of scanners hitting ports 80 and 443. But if they don't use the correct domain they all end up on an Nginx server hosting a static error page. Not much they can do there

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

This is how I found out Google harvests the URLs I visit through Chrome.

Got google bots trying to crawl deep links into a domain that I hadn't published anywhere.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

This is true, and is why I annoyingly have to keep robots.txt on my unpublished domains. Google does honor them for the most part, for now.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

That reminds me ... another annoying thing Google did was list my private jellyfin instance as a "deceptive site", after it had uninvitedly crawled it.

A common issue it seems.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago

Unsurprising, but still shitty. Par for the course for the company these days.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 13 hours ago

They did that with most of my subdomains