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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?
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.
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by gshaw
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David Hicks
It's for a VLE hosted elsewhere to hook up to our database in order to process enrolments etc
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.
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 :)
I've used XTEA for this purpose:Quote:
Originally Posted by gshaw
[ame=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XTEA]XTEA - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]
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David Hicks
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.
You can get (free) mutually authenticating SSL/TLS tunnel apps for Windows and they're not too hard to configure.
Sorry, meant to expand on that a bit. I posted example code on this thread:Quote:
Originally Posted by dhicks
http://www.edugeek.net/forums/mis-sy...llication.html
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