Is This A Security Risk?

[smoothcriminal 2]

I just started using a program called Audiostreamer that lets me stream my mp3's over the internet wherever I am.  It runs on port 9090 and I set up port forwarding on AirVPN to forward an AirVPN port reserved for me to port 9090 on my machine.  Then I access it over the internet via AirVPN's external IP at the reserved port.  That's all fine and good and seems nice and secure.  But my work blocks a few of the AirVPN IPs as suspected malware/spam.

 

So to get around this I forwarded port 9090 on my router to my PC and access directly via my real IP.  This now means that my computer is accessible on port 9090 without AirVPN protection/security.  I am ok if it is just limited to the streaming audio not being sent over AirVPN, but I'm not sure if this is a security risk in general.  Is it possible for anything else to leak out or be accessed via port 9090?  I just want to understand the risks to decide if I should leave my PC accessible over 9090 directly or not.

[OpenSourcerer 1435]

This now means that my computer is accessible on port 9090 without AirVPN protection/security.

 

OpenVPN does not enhance the security of your machines. If you browse to malwarehoster.com you will get infected, no matter if you're using AirVPN or not.

In contrast, what OpenVPN really does is to encrypt traffic between the client (here, the audiostreamer machine, I think?) and the server, so that listeners between these two would read encrypted messages only. Your audiostreamer share is accessible from the internet, no matter if its.my.real.ip:9090 or my.air.vpn.ip:9090.

 

So what you probably should do is to remove the forwarding rule in AirVPN and set up HTTPS, with a neat certificate and such. Setting up OpenVPN is much more complicated, as you may have experienced, besides, using it will not encrypt the way between your device and the server. But HTTPS will