Moodle in English: External Database authentication/enrollment secure communication on a remote server

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External Database authentication/enrollment secure communication on a remote server

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External Database authentication/enrollment secure communication on a remote server

by Ryan Foster - Saturday, January 11, 2014, 12:56 AM

I've been asked some questions regarding the security of the external database authentication/enrollment features.

If the external database is on a remote server, do options exist for securing that connection? If there are options, what are they and how are they configured/used?

Thanks!

Re: External Database authentication/enrollment secure communication on a remote server

by Dan Poltawski - Monday, January 13, 2014, 3:01 PM

Hi Ryan,

I think that securing the connection falls outside of Moodles arena for the most part, so there isn't anything particular in Moodle to secure this connection.

I think it would be best to handle this at the networking level and you can quite easily setup a secure tunnel between the two servers to achieve this and Moodle plugins will work fine with that. For example, a quick and dirty solution would be ssh tunnel between the two servers and connect to that tunnel. However, i'm sure other more robust solutions exist. Hopefully someone will have a good example of doing this in production.

Dan

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Re: External Database authentication/enrollment secure communication on a remote server

by Ryan Foster - Monday, January 13, 2014, 10:41 PM

Dan,

Thanks for your reply! Of course, shortly after I'd asked the question, I found MySQL's SSL documentation. Setting up an SSH tunnel would also probably work. Like you said, hopefully someone has some example of how they secure connections across servers.

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