I agree with your points here. I think a major issue is the lack of understanding of best-practices with regards to security. So we tend to rely on the securit

I agree with your points here. I think a major issue is the lack of understanding of best-practices with regards to security. So we tend to rely on the security of systems that aren't battle-proven. But even battle-proven solutions still have vulnerabilities, so we need to rely on multiple layers of security. For me at least, this reinforces the lesson to put systems as much as possible behind multiple layers of security such as firewalls and VPN. And I should be careful to architect salt systems in a hub/spoke topology using salt-master and syndics. And encrypt any traffic from the salt-master to groups of servers using ssh tunneling. Looks like pyzmq now supports ssh tunneling, so maybe this would work: http://zeromq.github.io/pyzmq/ssh.html http://zeromq.github.io/pyzmq/ssh.html