Security Considerations - mrvisser/node-cowboy GitHub Wiki

SSH tunnelling over public / untrusted networks

As you might have guessed, all communication between Redis and the Cattle and Cowboy nodes is unencrypted. Vanilla connections that are discussed here are not sufficient when communications go across public networks where attackers can sniff traffic that goes through.

If you are executing commands across an untrusted network, it is highly recommended to use something like an SSH tunnel to encrypt data sent between cowboy and the Redis server.

User Authorization and Auditing

Currently there is no way to authorize or audit commands that are executed on the Redis pub-sub channel. While Cowboy exposes Redis connection-level authorization, all commands are executed as the user of the cattle server process.