An important security problem with Firebird still remains unresolved: the transmission of poorly encrypted passwords "in clear" across the network. It is not possible to resolve this problem without breaking old clients.

To put it another way, a user who has set his/her password using a new secure method would be unable to use an older client to attach to the server. Taking this into account with plans to upgrade some aspects of the API in the next version, the decision was made not to change the password transmission method in Firebird 2.0.

The immediate problem can be solved easily by using any IP-tunneling software (such as ZeBeDee) to move data to and from a Firebird server, for both 1.5 and 2.0. It remains the recommended way to access your remote Firebird server across the Internet.