Security Considerations

Permissions

You should NOT run Navidrome as root. Ideally you should have it running under its own user. Navidrome only needs read-only access to the Music Folder, and read-write permissions to the Data Folder.

Encrypted passwords

To be able to keep compatibility with the Subsonic API and its clients, Navidrome needs to store user’s passwords in its database. By default, Navidrome encrypts the passwords in the DB with a shared encryption key, just for the sake of obfuscation as this key can be easily found in the codebase.

This key can be overridden by the config option PasswordEncryptionKey. Once this option is set and Navidrome is restarted, it will re-encrypt all passwords with this new key. This is a one-time only configuration, and after this point the config option cannot be changed anymore or else users won’t be able to authenticate.

Network configuration

Even though Navidrome comes with an embedded, full-featured HTTP server, you should seriously consider running it behind a reverse proxy (Ex: Caddy, Nginx, Traefik, Apache) for added security, including setting up SSL. There are tons of good resources on the web on how to properly setup a reverse proxy.

When using Navidrome in such configuration, you may want to prevent Navidrome from listening to all IPs configured in your computer, and only listen to localhost. This can be achieved by setting the Address flag to localhost

Reverse proxy authentication

When reverse proxy authentication is used, the verification is done by another system. By checking a specific HTTP header, Navidrome assumes you are already authenticated. This header can be configured via ReverseProxyUserHeader configuration option. By default, the Remote-User header is used.

By default, Navidrome denies every attempt. Authentication proxy needs to be whitelisted in CIDR format, using ReverseProxyWhitelist. Both IPv4 and IPv6 are supported.

NOTE: if you are listening on a UNIX socket, Navidrome will allow any connection to authenticate, as there is no remote IP exposed. Make sure to properly protect the socket with user access controls.

If you enable this feature and use a Subsonic client, you must whitelist the Subsonic API URL, as this authentication method is incompatible with the Subsonic authentication. You will need to whitelist the /rest/* URLs.

If a user is successfully authenticated by the proxy, but it does not exist in the Navidrome DB, it will be created with a random password. The user can change this password if they plan to use a Subsonic client.

If you plan to use the Sharing option, where you can create unauthenticated links to parts of your library, you’ll need to whitelist /share/* URLs.

Transcoding configuration

To configure transcoding, Navidrome’s WebUI provide a screen that allows you to edit existing transcoding configurations and to add new ones. That is similar to other music servers available in the market that provide transcoding on-demand.

The issue with this is that it potentially allows an attacker to run any command in your server. This married with the fact that some Navidrome installations don’t use SSL and/or run it as a super-user (root or Administrator), is a recipe for disaster!

In an effort to make Navidrome as secure as possible, we decided to disable the transcoding configuration editing in the UI by default. If you need to edit it (add or change a configuration), start Navidrome with the ND_ENABLETRANSCODINGCONFIG set to true. After doing your changes, don’t forget to remove this option or set it to false.

Limit login attempts

To protect against brute-force attacks, Navidrome is configured by default with a login rate limiter, It uses a Sliding Window algorithm to block too many consecutive login attempts. It is enabled by default and you don’t need to do anything. The rate limiter can be fine tuned using the flags AuthRequestLimit and AuthWindowLength and can be disabled by setting AuthRequestLimit to 0, though it is not recommended.