There are two areas of potential security vulnerabilities I see with ODBC over the Internet:
1. Privacy
A hacker with a
packet sniffer anywhere along the data path will be able to eavesdrop on your ODBC traffic.
This can be prevented by encrypting your data at the application layer before transmission, or by tunneling
ODBC using
SSH,
TLS, or
IPSec.
2. ODBC daemon vulnerabilities
The Internet-facing ODBC daemon will be subject to attack.
This is the same as any Internet daemon, such as a mail server or a web server. However, an
ODBC driver manager is a complex piece of software which at least
seems more likely to have security vulnerabilities.
Mature Internet daemons such as Apache's httpd have had millions of man-years of security research poured into them by both security professionals and computer hackers. ODBC daemons have not been subject to anywhere near as much security analysis.
This threat can be ameliorated if you can limit the number of remote IP addresses which are allowed to connect to your ODBC driver manager.
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