Prevent access to templates from a remote server

Question

I have some templates that output JSON in ExpressionEngine which we are called using a simple CURL request from a CodeIgniter app elsewhere on the same domain - we don't want these templates to be accessible to other sites as we want to control who has access to this data (though it's not sensitive) - how can we best go about achieving this?

I was thinking about using .htaccess but in some ways I would rather control it at a template level so it's not forgotten or missed in future site updates.

Answer 1

Could you use PHP to examine the requesting IP address or referrer?

Maybe have your requesting script pass some secret hash to the template which could check for it's presence before outputting the JSON?