No, I am not transmitting the passwd file over the internet. Both systems are located in the same physical location. The system outside the firewall can only be accessed from an internal system inside our firewall or via FTP which are chroot jailed. Plus hosts.deny is installed so the system can only be accessed by another system with the correct keys. There is no X or apache or ... installed on the system outside the firewall.

The passwd file is being transferred to an internal system using scp. Part of the reason I am doing this script is to enhance security, with an updated OpenSSH I am configuring chroot jailed SFTP.