What are the dangers of 'Port Forwarding port 80' on Shoreware director?

[Forum]

Customer wants to access webclient via internet. Using NAT on Port 80, he can access Director and Webclient on port 80. What are the dangers of this?

[aspen]

THe danger in this is that all traffic over port 80 is in plain text. I have not really tested the ST site to see how secure it is. You can do a couple of things to secure it more.

If you firewall supports protocol translation you could do it that way. Meaning send the traffic over the Internet over 443 and then translated it to port 80 on the LAN side. A Sonicwall Pro 2040 with enhanced OS can do this as well as many other high end Firewalls.

You could limit the source address allowed to connect to the sites inside of IIS. If you do this you will need to readded the changes after an upgrade, as the site setting revert back to default after an upgrade. You would want to grant all of you LAN address and only the addresses on the Internet that you want to access the director from