ESP8266 Community Forum

I'm using an esp8266-12 to control a relay for a light switch in my house. On the esp8266 I'm running nodemcu. The esp8266 is configure in station mode, with a fixed private IP address, and everything works flawlessly from any device on my private network, including androids. Incidentally, on my android I'm using roboremo to talk to the esp module.

The problem is when I want to talk to the esp module from the internet. I have opened a port in my router and I'm forwarding it to the esp. But there's no encryption and no password, no security whatsoever, so anyone on the internet can turn the lights on and off.

I guess I can have the esp module prompt the user for a password upon a new connection request, but then the password would travel unencrypted over the web, etc. So I guess I'm looking for some sort of ssh equivalent for esp.

Or perhaps I can have the router forward the open port not directly to the esp, but rather to a linux ssh server that can handle authentication and encryption, and have the ssh server execute commands on the esp? For that to work, roboremo running on my android phone should behave like and ssh client, i..e encrypt connections.

Any thoughts? Existing solutions?

I would set up a small server in your network, that will receive HTTPS connection from the outside, and send HTTP connections to the devices inside.