I‘m a happy Roon User at Home but no IT expert and I’m safety conscious.
I was wondering how safe is Room Arc? And which configuration is the safest and why: manual port forwarding? Enabling UPnP? Using Tailscale? Which other measures are required to make this as safe as possible?
If someone is for instance very concerned about safety, is there a way to not enable Roon Arc? I’ve seen from some posts that setting the port to 0 should work but in my case everytime I do this the port changes after a while automatically to the default one. If I don’t allow any port forwarding or UPnP is Roon arc essentially disabled?
No you can use Arc as long as you can reach you roon server. I use Open vpn to my gateway, but have also tried Tailscale which works just as good. Prefer Open vpn though, since I use other services at home like Home Assistant.
UPnP works the same way no matter which device uses it. If it’s your TV, a game console, a NAS, or Roon ARC, the mechanism is identical: the device asks the router to open a port, and the router agrees.
So Roon isn’t doing anything special or worse than other devices. If you already have UPnP enabled for things like consoles, Plex, or cameras, ARC isn’t uniquely risky compared to those.
Manual port forwarding is safer than UPnP because you’re explicitly opening one port and nothing else. ARC traffic is encrypted, so it’s not “wide open”, but that port is visible from the internet. That’s usually fine if your router is decent and kept up to date, but it’s still exposure.
Tailscale is by far the safest option if you still want ARC. No ports are opened at all. Your Roon server isn’t publicly reachable, and only your own devices can see it via an encrypted tunnel.
You do sound very concerned about safety, so yes you can choose to not use ARC. If you don’t enable any port forwarding and UPnP is disabled on your router. Then ARC simply cannot work from outside your home. There’s nothing exposed, so nothing can connect.
Regarding the port set to 0: should disable ARC, but it revert if UPnP or automatic networking is still enabled. So I wouldn’t rely on that alone. Router-level blocking is more reliable.
Make sure you don’t open the Roon ARC port in your firewall, and ARC will simply not be reachable from the internet.
Roon ARC connections are encrypted and authenticated, but the safest option is still not to expose any ports at all.
If you do want to use ARC, manual port forwarding is generally preferable to UPnP, since you know exactly which port is open and why.
And with that said, I do run a OpenVPN split tunnel between my home network and my laptop. That way I can access everything Roon-related from elsewhere, while still being able to use Roon ARC when driving my car, and that’s with a manual port forward and a port I chose.
The more you set up yourself, the better the understanding you will have.