Hi, I am new to installing Discourse, and recently set it up on a Digital Ocean Droplet for us as our company forum/community page. During the install, I noticed the SMTP password entry is not protected, and it is stored as plain text in the app.yml file. That seems like a potential security issu…

If someone your don’t trust has access to your app.yml file your smtp password is the least of your worries.

How would you propose protecting it? Hashes are one-way, they can’t be reversed back to the original data. User passwords are hashed because they don’t need to be reversible. A password hash in the database is only consulted when the user tries to log in. The hash of the provided password is compa…

[image] pfaffman: If someone your don’t trust has access to your app.yml file your smtp password is the least of your worries. As Jay said, if someone gets access to your app.yml, you have other problems. That means they likely have full root access to your server including your production da…

Hi All - Thanks for the replies. I agree that protecting the server is the first line of defense. However, in this case it’s out of my control since I have installed Discourse on a Digital Ocean Droplet. @Stephen - thanks for the background info on SMTP passwords. I did not know that it’s common…

[image] MidwestJay: However, in this case it’s out of my control since I have installed Discourse on a Digital Ocean Droplet. Not exactly :slight_smile: You can restrict logins to an SSH key only, have a running firewall, and make sure security patches are applied regularly. That’s a signific…

[image] MidwestJay: in this case it’s out of my control since I have installed Discourse on a Digital Ocean Droplet That’s right. And unless you have your file system encrypted, which is difficult to do, then you have to trust them too. They have physical access to the servers and the network…

SMTP Password saved as plain text?

Product Support Self-hosting

justin (Justin DiRose) March 13, 2020, 4:36pm 6

Not exactly You can restrict logins to an SSH key only, have a running firewall, and make sure security patches are applied regularly. That’s a significant percentage of securing a droplet.

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SMTP Password saved as plain text?

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