Ideas on most secure way to transfer CFDB records?

  • CFDB has been doing a great job on my site and I pull down the results daily. I would now like to pass these results to someone else but without:

      – Having results publicly accessible on our site.
      – Giving the other party admin login details to our site.

    Any thoughts on the best way to achieve this? I’m considering:-

      1. Providing an Excel download link with credentials hidden – I don’t fully understand what “Hide Credentials” means here – i.e. is it possible to use the encoded credentials for anything other than downloading the Excel export?
      2. Perhaps 1. can work if I create a user specifically for this and ensure that it only has limited other privileges (I’ve not experimented much with this on WordPress as my site doesn’t currently have any other users apart from me).
      3. Providing a WordPress password protected page with a display of the database using a shortcode.
      4. Doing it from my local download (i.e. download and then do some other form of transfer – this seems safer, but is practically more difficult for various reasons.
      5. Another way? e.g. look into dumping results to file on the server and providing an SFTP access to a specific location only.

    I appreciate that depending on the answer this may not be a 100% CFDB question, but hope that posting here is sensible and is possibly useful to other plugin users.

    Thanks for any suggestions.

    • This topic was modified 7 years, 10 months ago by stuartb3502.
    • This topic was modified 7 years, 10 months ago by stuartb3502.
    • This topic was modified 7 years, 10 months ago by stuartb3502.
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  • Thread Starter stuartb3502

    (@stuartb3502)

    Answering my own question. I have created a shell script which calls the CFDB Excel download link and saves the file to a directory on the server. I’m providing limited FTP access to that folder.

    Stuart

    The office admin wanted to be able to download form data to a spreadsheet for reference if their ISP goes down, and did not want to go into dashboard operations. I created a passworded page with direct navigation only (not linked on the site). Once passworded into the page, a data form appears with export link. No login required.

    Thread Starter stuartb3502

    (@stuartb3502)

    Sounds like a good solution for your scenario.

    In my case the need was for an automated script to be able to pick up the data. Although we could have scripted access to a web page, the way we’re doing it works well and has some security advantages.

    The CFDB export uses credentials which are not provided to the external party and the script itself is outside of the web-site folder structure and secured by permissions.

    Our client’s FTP account is limited to seeing just their folder and a limited amount of data. I dare say this last part could be achieved through shortcodes as well although confess to be sketchy about how secure this would be.

    Hey @stuartb3502,

    I’ve been looking for a solution to this and excited to see it’s possible! Would you be able to give any advice on setting up the script? Unfortunately I’m a bit of a noob at remote possibilities with WordPress and unsure on how you’d go about calling the export link (through WP-ClI?)

    Cheers!

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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