Comment on How do I host Jellyfin in the most secure manner possible?
litchralee@sh.itjust.works 1 week agoI had a small typo where “untrusted” was written as “I trusted”. That said, I think we’re suggesting different strategies to address OP’s quandary, and either (or both!) would be valid.
My suggestion was for encrypted L3 tunneling between end-devices which are trusted, so that even an untrustworthy L2 network would present no issue. With technologies like WireGuard, this isn’t too hard to do for mobile phone clients, and it’s well supported for Linux clients.
If I understand your suggestion, it is to improve the LAN so that it can be trusted, by way of segmentation into VLANs which separate the trusted devices from the rest. The problem I see with this is that per-port VLANs alone do not address the possibility of physical wire-tapping, which I presumed was why OP does not trust their own LAN. Perhaps they’re running cable through a space shared with other tenants, or something like that. VLANs help, but MACsec encryption on the wire paired with 802.1x device certificate for authentication is the gold standard for L2 security.
But seeing as that’s primarily the domain of enterprise switches, the L3 solution in software using WireGuard or other tunneling technologies seems more reasonable.
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 1 week ago
Physical wire tapping would be mostly mitigated by setting every port on the switch to be a physical vlan, especially if the switch does the VLAN routing. Sure someone could splice an ethernet cable, which would really only be mitigated by 802.1x like you already said, but every part of this threat model makes zero sense. You ultimately have to trust something (and apparently in OP’s case that’s a third party VPN provider that charges extra to not block LAN access while connected and they remain entirely on the free tier of)
But at the very least, not trusting everything on the network is a very enterprise kind of threat model, so using standard enterprise practices of network segmentation, firewalling, and potentially MAC-binding and 802.1x if so desired isn’t a bad idea, if for no other reason than it might lead to a career in network administration. And honestly I mostly want to get OP to not think of VPNs like a magical silver bullet and see what other tools exist in the toolbox
litchralee@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Can you clarify on this point? I’m not sure what a “physical VLAN” would be. Is that like only handling tagged traffic?
I’m otherwise in total agreement that the threat model is certainly not typical. But I can imagine a scenario like a college dorm where the L2 network is owned by a university, and thus considered “hostile” to OP somehow. OP presented their requirements, so good advice has to at least try to come up with solutions within those parameters.
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 1 week ago
Y’know what that was terrible writing on my part. Where I put “physical vlan” I just meant specifying each port be a specific vlan rather than a trunk port that has multiple clans on in
I should probably proofread more and write less when tired