Nope, that's it. Erlang is designed for cluster environments, and the cookie method is lightweight and good enough for that sort of environment. If you want be

Nope, that's it. Erlang is designed for cluster environments, and the cookie method is lightweight and good enough for that sort of environment. If you want better security, unfortunately you have to roll it yourself. You could write a message router that tunnels Erlang messages over TCP, and apply some sort of authentication process to that. Erlang applications that are exposed to the Internet do not allow Erlang connections from the outside, but rather implement a custom socket protocol and only use Erlang distribution internally. I hear that they're planning on adding better security in future versions, but I don't know any details about that.