I am currently looking at possible development models for a device that will be in a clients home. I need the device to run a local copy of Meteor while also being able to get and insert information from a central server in a secure/reactive way.
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I am required to make a local server as I need to run shell commands on the device. While the device could make HTTP webhook calls, it would be slow due to packet travel time and does not meet requirements.
I know that the local server could connect to the Central Server mongodb which would be ideal, however as this local server is physically located in a clients house, this means that the mongodb password would be exposed (big security problem). Also I would be unable to control what information is sent to the local server. I was unable to find a way to subscribe to an external server, which would be a great solution.
Another way could be that the local server simply use HTTP requests, however another requirement is that Audit requests appear almost as soon as they are issued which is ideal for a reactive mongodb item. A heartbeat wouldn't really fit due to the data/processing overheads and slowness.
The summary the question is: How to make a device to run a local copy of Meteor while also being able to get and insert information from a central server in a secure/reactive way.
Well in the end, I found that you can use cross-server and even CORS connections with https://docs.meteor.com/api/connections.html
So now any aspiring developer can use the DDP framework.
Related
I have an Ubuntu VM installed on a client's VMware system. Recently, the client's IT informed us that his firewall has been detecting consistent potential port scans to our VM's internal IP address (coming from 87.238.57.227). He asked if this was part of a known package update process on our VM.
He sent us a firewall output where we can see several instances of the port scan, but there are also instances of our Ubuntu VM trying to communicate back to the external server on port 37258 (this is dropped by the firewall).
Based on a google lookup, the hostname of the external IP address is "feris.postgresql.org", with the ASN pointing to a European company called Redpill-Linpro. As far as I can tell, they offer IT consulting services, specializing in open source software (like PostgreSQL, which is installed on our VM). I have never heard of them before though and have no idea why our VM would be communicating with them or vice-versa. I'm also not sure if I'm interpreting the IP lookup information correctly: https://ipinfo.io/87.238.57.227
I'm looking for a way to confirm or disprove that this is just our VM pinging for a standard postgres update. If that's the case I'd like to restrict this behaviour. We would prefer to do these types of updates manually and limit the communication outside of the VM to what is strictly necessary for the functionality of our application.
Update
I sent an email to Redpill's abuse account. They responded quickly saying that the server should not be port scanning anyone and if it appears that way, something is wrong.
The server is part of a cluster of machines that serves apt.postgresql.org among other postgres download sites. I don't think we have anything like ansible or puppet installed that would automatically check for updates but I will look into that to make sure. I'm wondering if Ubuntu reaching out to update the MOTD with the number of available packages would explain why our VM is trying to reach out to the external postgres server?
The abuse rep said in any case there should only be outgoing connections from the VM, not incoming. He asked for some additional info so I will keep communicating with him and try to update this post accordingly
My communication with the client's IT dropped off so I did not get a definitive answer on this, but I'll provide some new details:
I reached out to the abuse email for Redpill-Linpro. He got back to me and confirmed the server corresponding to the detected IP address is part of a cluster that hosts postgres download sites, including apt.postgresql.org. He was surprised to learn we had detected a port scan from their server and seems eager to figure out why that is happening.
He asked if the client IT could pass along some necessary info for them to set up tracking on that server. But the client IT never got back to me. I think he was satisfied that it wasn't malicious and stopped pursuing it.
Here's one of the messages the abuse rep sent me that may be relevant:
That does look a lot like the tcp to the apt download server yes. It's
strange that your firewall reports that many incoming connections, but
they could be fallout from some connection tracking that's not
operating as intended. The timing appears to be matching up more or
less perfectly. And there should definitely not be any ping-back
connections from it.
Since you appear to be using the http version of the server (and not https) bringing the data in cleartext, they should be able to just
dump the TCP connection contents and verify exactly what it does. But
I bet they are going to see a number of http requests initiated by the
apt client that is checking for updates.
I'm learning the concepts of a NoSQL database, especially CouchDB. But I have a doubt that may sound stupid, but I have not found answers on the internet. Where does CouchDB work? On a regular web hosting service or on my local network? Ex: My computer and my localhost.
CouchDB can be installed as single-node on any computer, including your local machine. CouchDB may also be used in clustered mode.
HTTP is used to write data (documents) and request information from the database. Therefore, the database may be hosted along with your website but it doesn't have to. All depends on your use case. The only important thing is that your web application knows about the host name, port number and credentials allowing it to access CouchDB over HTTP.
I am trying to DDoS a local server on my PC in order to test out some anti-DDoS methods on my local server. I am trying to simulate several IoT devices that will do a http GET request to my server on loop, trying to attck the server, I have already written the code (a simple js GET request) and it does work on a physical IoT Device. I need to scale it up to multiple in an IoT network environment, and I have been trying to use IoTify.io, but i cant quite understand the template creation phase. Can someone explain or point me at a tutorial/documentation that could help. P.S. I have read through the documentation provided already and I do require more Info. Thank you.
I am setting up two computers to run a web application. web-host hosts a MongoDB database and NodeJS web server, while worker runs some more demanding processes and populates the database. Using an SSH tunnel from worker, web-host:27017 is accessible using localhost:9999 from worker. web-host:80 has been set up to be accessible on http://our.corporate.site/my_site/.
At the moment MongoDB has no authentication on it - anything that can contact web-host:27017 can read or write anything to the database.
With this setup, how paranoid should I be about authenticating requests to MongoDB? The answers to this question seemed to suggest not very. Considering access is only possible from localhost it seems about as secure as the local file system. In MySQL I usually have a special 'web' user with limited privileges to limit the damage of an injection attack in case I make a mistake sanitizing input, however MongoDB seems less vulnerable to injection (or at least easier to sanitize) compared with MySQL.
Here's the issue: If you do set-up Mongo authentication, you are going to need to store the keys on the machine that accesses it.
So assuming that web-host:80 is compromised, the keys are also vulnerable.
There are some mitigation processes you can use to secure your environment, but there is no silver bullet if an attacker gains root access to your environment.
First I would consider putting mongodb on a separate machine on a private internal network that can only be accessed by machines in a DMZ (the part of the network where machines can communicate with your internal network and the outside world).
Next, assuming you are running a Linux-based system, you should be able to use AppArmor or SELinux to limit which processes are allowed to make outbound network requests. In this case only your webapp process should be able to initiate network requests such as connecting to your Mongo database.
If an attacker was able to get non-root access on your machine, the SELinux/AppArmor system policy would prevent them from initiating a connection to your database from their own script.
Using this architecture, you should be more secure than simply augmenting your current architecture with authentication. In a choice between the SELinux/AppArmor, I would use SELinux, since it is was much more mature and had much more granular control the last time I checked.
My question, to be more clear, it is to create a server with mongodb on a cloud hosting (for example) and access it through another server.
Example:
I have a mobile app.
I hosted my mongoDB a cloud hosting (ubuntu).
I want to connect my app to the db on the server cloud.
Is it possible? How?
I'm joining this learning and my question was exactly MongoDB to create a server in a way that I could access it remotely.
Out of "localhost"? Different from all the tutorials I've seen.
From what you are describing, I think you want to implement a 2-Tier-Architecture. For practically all use cases, don't do it!
It's definitely possible, yes. You can open up the MongoDB port in your firewall. Let's say your computer has a fixed IP or a fixed name like mymongo.example.com. You can then connect to mongodb://mymongo.example.com:27017 (if you use the default port). But beware:
Security You need to make sure that clients can only perform those operations that you want to allow, e.g. using MongoDB integrated authentication, otherwise some random script kiddie will steal you database, delete it, or fill it with random data. Many servers, even if they don't host a well-known service, get attacked thousands of times per day. Also, you probably want to encrypt the connection so people can't spy on the connection. And to make it all worse, you will have to store the database credentials in your client app, which is practically impossible to do in a truly secure way.
Software architecture There is a ton of arguments against this architecture, but 1) alone should be enough. You never want to couple your client to the database, be it because of data migrations, software updates, security considerations, etc.
3-Tier
So what to do instead? Use a 3-Tier-Architecture: Host a server of some kind on mymongo.example.com that then connects to the database. That server could be implemented in nginx/node.js, iis/asp.net, apache/php, or whatever. It could even be a plain old C application (like many game servers).
The mongodb can still reside on yet a different machine, but when you use a server, the database credentials are only known to the server, not to all the clients.
Yes, it is possible. You would connect to MongoDB using the ip address of your host, or preferably using it's fully qualified hostname rather than "localhost". If you do that, you should secure your MongoDB installation otherwise anyone would be able to connect to your MongoDB instance. At an absolute minimum, enable MongoDB authentication. You should read up on MongoDB Security.
For a mobile application, you would probably have some sort of application server in front of MongoDB, e.g. your mobile application would not be connecting to MongoDB directly. In that case only your application server would be connecting to MongoDB, and you would secure MongoDB accordingly.