Sending data over Internet securely?

[gshaw]

If I wanted to link an app in one location to a data source elsewhere, both on completely separate networks etc what would be the most secure method other than a VPN? Been trying to dig around for info on https connections, TLS etc but haven't found anything concrete as yet?

[SYNACK]

SSL encrypted web service on the datasource side to provide the information in a secure fashion is how I'd look at going about it.

[dhicks]

If I wanted to link an app in one location to a data source elsewhere

In what context? You don't have to use public-private key encryption if you just need the two locations to communicate and you can get a known, secure encryption key to each location.

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David Hicks

[gshaw]

It's for a VLE hosted elsewhere to hook up to our database in order to process enrolments etc

[theriver]

You may also wish to consider perfomance - if the app is one one network and the data is on another, you could find it performs quite slowly.

[gshaw]

It's just to sync up every couple of hours in the background rather than being queried each connection so that won't be a roblem

[dhicks]

It's for a VLE hosted elsewhere to hook up to our database in order to process enrolments etc

I've used XTEA for this purpose:

[ame=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XTEA]XTEA - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]

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David Hicks

[tom_newton]

Depends on what you have at either end. 2 solutions might involve SSH tunnelling (easy with an ssh portforward, but needs ssh server which isnt standard on windows) or if you have a web server bumbling about, a bit of cgi in perl and some lwp monkeying can produce quick results over https.

[PiqueABoo]

You can get (free) mutually authenticating SSL/TLS tunnel apps for Windows and they're not too hard to configure.

[dhicks]

I've used XTEA for this purpose

Sorry, meant to expand on that a bit. I posted example code on this thread:

Looking for a command Reporter based Apllication

The Python utility there runs a web service that produces results from SIMS, but you could change the embedded command-lines to run whatever you liked. The web server is actually written in Python, using Python's built-in facilities, so there's no need to mess around installing or configuring anything other than Python itself. For the XTEA encryption part of things you just need to provide a suitably random key, there's simple encrypt() and decrypt() functions to call to (unsurprisingly) encrypt and decrypt your data.

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David Hicks