How to secure Redis Cluster?

Question

I know Redis Cluster is still unstable, but it's been passing all the unit tests since quite a long time so I started using it.

I would like to know if a Redis Cluster would work well if the nodes required authentication. I'm incline to think yes, because they connect through a different port and use a different protocol, but I'm not sure and couldn't find any documentation or anything on the spec to confirm this.

Also, if the redis cluster protocol flies over the authentication barrier, isn't it a hole in security ? Could my database be accessed by the outside world ? (the port at least must be accessible so it can talk to the other nodes)

Answer 1

SSH tunnel may be an easy solution:

1. You don't need to expose the redis port to the outside world. only the ssh one.
2. SSH support data compression, which can reduce the transfer between data centers.

Quick Example: ssh -f -L 1234:localhost:6379 server.com -NC

This will route any incoming connection to localhost:1234 to the remote server.com:6379. So, you can replace server.com:6379 with localhost:1234 in your redis config file.

You could check man ssh for more information.