NodeJS how to secure socket.io sessions across different countries

Question

I'm making a nodejs application that will act a server for other sites in different countries as the data being transmitted will be business related data. I would like to know how I can safely/securely send this data.

I am currently using socket.io to act as my main server (Master) on other sites there are (Slave) servers that handle the data from the master server.

I have got this working in a local environment but want to deploy this in the other sites.

I have tried to Google this to see if anyone else has done this but came across socket.io sessions but I don't know if this will fit with (Server->Server) connections.

Any help or experience would be grateful.

Answer 1

For server-server communication where you control both ends of the communication you can use WebSocket over HTTPS, you can use TCP over SSH tunnel or any other encrypted tunnel. You can use a PubSub service, a queue service etc. There are a lot of ways you can do it. Just make sure that the communication is encrypted either natively by the protocols you use or with VPN or tunnels that connect your servers in remote locations.

Socket.io is usually used as a replacement for WebSocket where there is no native support in the browser. It is rarely used for server to server communication. See this answer for more details:

• Differences between socket.io and websockets

If you want a higher level framework with focus on real-time data then see ActionHero:

• https://www.actionherojs.com/

For other options of sending real-time data between servers you can use some shared resource like a Redis database or some pub/sub service like Faye or Kafka, or a queue service like ZeroMQ or RabbitMQ. This is what is usually done to make things like that work across multiple instances of the server or multiple locations. You could also use a CouchDB changes feed, or a similar feature of RethinkDB to make sure that all of your instances get all the data as soon as it is posted by any one of them. See:

• http://docs.couchdb.org/en/2.0.0/api/database/changes.html
• https://rethinkdb.com/docs/changefeeds/javascript/
• https://redis.io/topics/pubsub
• https://faye.jcoglan.com/
• https://kafka.apache.org/

Everything that uses HTTP is easy to encrypt with HTTPS. Everything else can be encrypted with a tunnel or VPN.

Good tools that can add encryption for protocols that are not encrypted themselves (like e.g. the Redis protocol) are:

• http://www.tarsnap.com/spiped.html
• https://www.stunnel.org/index.html
• https://openvpn.net/
• https://forwardhq.com/help/ssh-tunneling-how-to

See also:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunneling_protocol

Note that some hosting services may give you preconfigured tunnels or internal network interfaces that pass data encrypted between your servers located in different data centers of that provider. Some providers give you tools and tutorials to that easily as well.