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Comment by EmielMols | Hacker News Reader

We might add proxy-over-ssh/vlan options later on, but it would be incompatible with the 2-clicks-and-your-done interface right now.

As far as I know, postgres authentication is rather simple and exposing the port does not easily add huge liability.

This is really a trade-off between ease-of-setup and better security. We're eager to talk to (a lot of) users to see what there current setup is and how PGBackup could add some value for them.

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> exposing the port would not add liabilities.

Famous last words of security on the internet.

The comment caught me off guard as well. It seems as a customer you're placing a lot of trust in this company as you're replicating your data to them and then trusting that they will handle and store it securely.

Until then (or additionally) you could add a FAQ entry with your server IP range(s), so people can allow them in their firewall for the specific port (usually 5432).

If they are on AWS or similar, their IP range may be <all of AWS>, at which point your firewall is not doing much walling.

Even if not concerned with security, it opens a pretty easy DOS window. Authentication happens after forking of a new backend. That's not exactly cheap...

Thanks for pointing this out!

You might want to use an overlay networking solution like https://wormhole.network

Edit to add why: You'll have full reachability between pgbackup and your customer's servers without opening ports inbound on either side. Traffic is also encrypted :-)

Disclaimer: I am part of Wormhole Network.

For customers with stronger security concerns, they could issue your service a client cert and only allow replication connections from your service's IP range that auth with certificate.

Seems like so much hassle and energy.. Which could be used to back it all up yourself.

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