Permissions and calling ‘wp-blog-header.php’ from outside of the WP directory

I have been using the methods (with some minor tweaks for my needs) from here:

http://www.transycan.net/blogtest/2005/07/05/integrate/2/

to display the first few blog summaries on a home page outside of the WP directory. I call the header using ‘require(‘blog/wp-blog-header.php’);’ then add “The Loop” to the home page. It works fine on my test server, but when I promote it to production the permissions for the ‘wp-config.php’ is set to 600 for security purposes. Now my questions:

1. Is there a way to call the wp-config.php via the wp-blog-header.php outside of the blog directory without having to set the permissions to 644?

2. Or are the permissions at 644 okay (I may be a little too paranoid about the security).

Thanks for the help.