Password-protect private stuff - content-management-system

I'm looking for a portable way (application, file format, library/API, CMS, DBMS, whatever) to deny read and write access to a collection of text files unless the user enters the password. This would be for personal use, i.e. the files would be stored on my computer, which I share with other people.
I've already tried with:
password protected archives: but even a minor edit to one file requires unpacking
and re-packing everything, which is quite annoying
a wiki backed by a DBMS, with a single password protected account: but the DBMS
root user will be able to read my stuff
... any ideas?

I use TrueCrypt to mount an encrypted volume on my PC. Also available for Mac and Linux.
I mount the volume when I want to work with the files (the volume shows up as a new drive letter), and unmount it when done. The mount does not survive a reboot, so shutting down the computer guarantees that the volume will have to be re-mounted before it can be accessed again.

Related

XCOPY command to copy files to SAN Storage

Is there any command to transfer files to SAN storage usin xcopy? Please help me
SAN storage devices are typically of 2 classes: NAS and Block. The first use file-level access, i.e. use NFS, SMB/CIFS and etc (even FTP) to transfer files there.
Block-storage devices provide their space as raw drive-space, which is used as drives on the servers. So you have to attach the drive, create a new or mount an existing file-system to be able to copy files there.

Default UNIX permissions of Mongodb files in the hard drive

I noticed that the files in the data/ directory, hosting the databases and collections, are the r permission for others.
So basically, anyone can read the data! Isn't it strange, or is it something I'm missing?
I found no solution to change this behavior in the mondodb configuration (ubuntu 18.04). When you search mongodb file permissions, you will find threads about user permissions inside the database.
Thank you!
Im going to assume you're using WiredTiger, the default storage engine for mongo. Either way, the same concept applies.
You'll see the .wt files (the ones you're talking about), although readable by permission, are not very readable to the eye. Try look for yourself with less <example>.wt.
They're stored in a specific format, with compression and some encryption. Realistically, they shouldn't be able to be retrieved from outside of your server - and your users in the server should trusted, or given limited access to the locations of these files.
In short, if you apply the proper policies, and keep your actual database and server secure, then this is normal and expected. I hope this makes sense.
When you launch mongod you need to specify a path to the data directory, and this directory must already exist.
You can set the permissions on this directory to deny world-read access by running:
chmod o-rwx /path/to/data/dir
Normally this would be done prior to the first start of mongod.
Once this is done, none of the files in the data directory will be world-readable regardless of their individual permissions.
MongoDB does not need to have a provision to do this because it never creates the data directory.
A different way of accomplishing similar end result is to use umask, but changing permissions on data directory generally would be more reliable.

sshfs -o follow_symlinks mounts with broken softlinks

Up until a day ago I was perfectly able to mount a drive via sshfs with the follow_symlinks option given.
In fact I set up an alias for this command and used it for several weeks.
Since yesterday, using the same alias the volume still mounts correctly but the all the soft symlinks within that volume are broken.
Logging in using a regular ssh session confirms the symlinks actually are functioning.
Are there any configuration files that may interfere with what I try to do?
I was modifying /etc/ssh/ssh_config and /etc/hosts because I experienced severe login delays when starting an ssh session from a friend's place. But I reverted any changes later on.
Could a wrong configuration in these files cause my issue?
Btw. I'm using Ubuntu 16.04
It turns out that the permissions on the particular machine I was trying to mount the folder from changed over the weekend.
It is now only allowing access to certain folders from within the same network. That is why my soft-links (pointing to now permission restricted content) seemed broken when mounting from my home network.

Is there a way to upload data from FTP server to Amazon S3? [duplicate]

Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
This question does not appear to be about a specific programming problem, a software algorithm, or software tools primarily used by programmers. If you believe the question would be on-topic on another Stack Exchange site, you can leave a comment to explain where the question may be able to be answered.
Closed 3 years ago.
Improve this question
Is there a way to connect to an Amazon S3 bucket with FTP or SFTP rather than the built-in Amazon file transfer interface in the AWS console? Seems odd that this isn't a readily available option.
There are three options.
You can use a native Amazon Managed SFTP service (aka AWS Transfer for SFTP), which is easier to set up.
Or you can mount the bucket to a file system on a Linux server and access the files using the SFTP as any other files on the server (which gives you greater control).
Or you can just use a (GUI) client that natively supports S3 protocol (what is free).
Managed SFTP Service
In your Amazon AWS Console, go to AWS Transfer for SFTP and create a new server.
In SFTP server page, add a new SFTP user (or users).
Permissions of users are governed by an associated AWS role in IAM service (for a quick start, you can use AmazonS3FullAccess policy).
The role must have a trust relationship to transfer.amazonaws.com.
For details, see my guide Setting up an SFTP access to Amazon S3.
Mounting Bucket to Linux Server
Just mount the bucket using s3fs file system (or similar) to a Linux server (e.g. Amazon EC2) and use the server's built-in SFTP server to access the bucket.
Install the s3fs
Add your security credentials in a form access-key-id:secret-access-key to /etc/passwd-s3fs
Add a bucket mounting entry to fstab:
<bucket> /mnt/<bucket> fuse.s3fs rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other 0 0
For details, see my guide Setting up an SFTP access to Amazon S3.
Use S3 Client
Or use any free "FTP/SFTP client", that's also an "S3 client", and you do not have setup anything on server-side. For example, my WinSCP or Cyberduck.
WinSCP has even scripting and .NET/PowerShell interface, if you need to automate the transfers.
Update
S3 now offers a fully-managed SFTP Gateway Service for S3 that integrates with IAM and can be administered using aws-cli.
There are theoretical and practical reasons why this isn't a perfect solution, but it does work...
You can install an FTP/SFTP service (such as proftpd) on a linux server, either in EC2 or in your own data center... then mount a bucket into the filesystem where the ftp server is configured to chroot, using s3fs.
I have a client that serves content out of S3, and the content is provided to them by a 3rd party who only supports ftp pushes... so, with some hesitation (due to the impedance mismatch between S3 and an actual filesystem) but lacking the time to write a proper FTP/S3 gateway server software package (which I still intend to do one of these days), I proposed and deployed this solution for them several months ago and they have not reported any problems with the system.
As a bonus, since proftpd can chroot each user into their own home directory and "pretend" (as far as the user can tell) that files owned by the proftpd user are actually owned by the logged in user, this segregates each ftp user into a "subdirectory" of the bucket, and makes the other users' files inaccessible.
There is a problem with the default configuration, however.
Once you start to get a few tens or hundreds of files, the problem will manifest itself when you pull a directory listing, because ProFTPd will attempt to read the .ftpaccess files over, and over, and over again, and for each file in the directory, .ftpaccess is checked to see if the user should be allowed to view it.
You can disable this behavior in ProFTPd, but I would suggest that the most correct configuration is to configure additional options -o enable_noobj_cache -o stat_cache_expire=30 in s3fs:
-o stat_cache_expire (default is no expire)
specify expire time(seconds) for entries in the stat cache
Without this option, you'll make fewer requests to S3, but you also will not always reliably discover changes made to objects if external processes or other instances of s3fs are also modifying the objects in the bucket. The value "30" in my system was selected somewhat arbitrarily.
-o enable_noobj_cache (default is disable)
enable cache entries for the object which does not exist. s3fs always has to check whether file(or sub directory) exists under object(path) when s3fs does some command, since s3fs has recognized a directory which does not exist and has files or subdirectories under itself. It increases ListBucket request and makes performance bad. You can specify this option for performance, s3fs memorizes in stat cache that the object (file or directory) does not exist.
This option allows s3fs to remember that .ftpaccess wasn't there.
Unrelated to the performance issues that can arise with ProFTPd, which are resolved by the above changes, you also need to enable -o enable_content_md5 in s3fs.
-o enable_content_md5 (default is disable)
verifying uploaded data without multipart by content-md5 header. Enable to send "Content-MD5" header when uploading a object without multipart posting. If this option is enabled, it has some influences on a performance of s3fs when uploading small object. Because s3fs always checks MD5 when uploading large object, this option does not affect on large object.
This is an option which never should have been an option -- it should always be enabled, because not doing this bypasses a critical integrity check for only a negligible performance benefit. When an object is uploaded to S3 with a Content-MD5: header, S3 will validate the checksum and reject the object if it's corrupted in transit. However unlikely that might be, it seems short-sighted to disable this safety check.
Quotes are from the man page of s3fs. Grammatical errors are in the original text.
Answer from 2014 for the people who are down-voting me:
Well, S3 isn't FTP. There are lots and lots of clients that support S3, however.
Pretty much every notable FTP client on OS X has support, including Transmit and Cyberduck.
If you're on Windows, take a look at Cyberduck or CloudBerry.
Updated answer for 2019:
AWS has recently released the AWS Transfer for SFTP service, which may do what you're looking for.
Or spin Linux instance for SFTP Gateway in your AWS infrastructure that saves uploaded files to your Amazon S3 bucket.
Supported by Thorntech
Amazon has released SFTP services for S3, but they only do SFTP (not FTP or FTPES) and they can be cost prohibitive depending on your circumstances.
I'm the Founder of DocEvent.io, and we provide FTP/S Gateways for your S3 bucket without having to spin up servers or worry about infrastructure.
There are also other companies that provide a standalone FTP server that you pay by the month that can connect to an S3 bucket through the software configuration, for example brickftp.com.
Lastly there are also some AWS Marketplace apps that can help, here is a search link. Many of these spin up instances in your own infrastructure - this means you'll have to manage and upgrade the instances yourself which can be difficult to maintain and configure over time.
WinSCp now supports S3 protocol
First, make sure your AWS user with S3 access permissions has an “Access key ID” created. You also have to know the “Secret access key”. Access keys are created and managed on Users page of IAM Management Console.
Make sure New site node is selected.
On the New site node, select Amazon S3 protocol.
Enter your AWS user Access key ID and Secret access key
Save your site settings using the Save button.
Login using the Login button.
Filezilla just released a Pro version of their FTP client. It connects to S3 buckets in a streamlined FTP like experience. I use it myself (no affiliation whatsoever) and it works great.
As other posters have pointed out, there are some limitations with the AWS Transfer for SFTP service. You need to closely align requirements. For example, there are no quotas, whitelists/blacklists, file type limits, and non key based access requires external services. There is also a certain overhead relating to user management and IAM, which can get to be a pain at scale.
We have been running an SFTP S3 Proxy Gateway for about 5 years now for our customers. The core solution is wrapped in a collection of Docker services and deployed in whatever context is needed, even on-premise or local development servers. The use case for us is a little different as our solution is focused data processing and pipelines vs a file share. In a Salesforce example, a customer will use SFTP as the transport method sending email, purchase...data to an SFTP/S3 enpoint. This is mapped an object key on S3. Upon arrival, the data is picked up, processed, routed and loaded to a warehouse. We also have fairly significant auditing requirements for each transfer, something the Cloudwatch logs for AWS do not directly provide.
As other have mentioned, rolling your own is an option too. Using AWS Lightsail you can setup a cluster, say 4, of $10 2GB instances using either Route 53 or an ELB.
In general, it is great to see AWS offer this service and I expect it to mature over time. However, depending on your use case, alternative solutions may be a better fit.

Docker and sensitive information used at run-time

We are dockerizing an application (written in Node.js) that will need to access some sensitive data at run-time (API tokens for different services) and I can't find any recommended approach to deal with that.
Some information:
The sensitive information is not in our codebase, but it's kept on another repository in encrypted format.
On our current deployment, without Docker, we update the codebase with git, and then we manually copy the sensitive information via SSH.
The docker images will be stored in a private, self-hosted registry
I can think of some different approaches, but all of them have some drawbacks:
Include the sensitive information in the Docker images at build time. This is certainly the easiest one; however, it makes them available to anyone with access to the image (I don't know if we should trust the registry that much).
Like 1, but having the credentials in a data-only image.
Create a volume in the image that links to a directory in the host system, and manually copy the credentials over SSH like we're doing right now. This is very convenient too, but then we can't spin up new servers easily (maybe we could use something like etcd to synchronize them?)
Pass the information as environment variables. However, we have 5 different pairs of API credentials right now, which makes this a bit inconvenient. Most importantly, however, we would need to keep another copy of the sensitive information in the configuration scripts (the commands that will be executed to run Docker images), and this can easily create problems (e.g. credentials accidentally included in git, etc).
PS: I've done some research but couldn't find anything similar to my problem. Other questions (like this one) were about sensitive information needed at build-time; in our case, we need the information at run-time
I've used your options 3 and 4 to solve this in the past. To rephrase/elaborate:
Create a volume in the image that links to a directory in the host system, and manually copy the credentials over SSH like we're doing right now.
I use config management (Chef or Ansible) to set up the credentials on the host. If the app takes a config file needing API tokens or database credentials, I use config management to create that file from a template. Chef can read the credentials from encrypted data bag or attributes, set up the files on the host, then start the container with a volume just like you describe.
Note that in the container you may need a wrapper to run the app. The wrapper copies the config file from whatever the volume is mounted to wherever the application expects it, then starts the app.
Pass the information as environment variables. However, we have 5 different pairs of API credentials right now, which makes this a bit inconvenient. Most importantly, however, we would need to keep another copy of the sensitive information in the configuration scripts (the commands that will be executed to run Docker images), and this can easily create problems (e.g. credentials accidentally included in git, etc).
Yes, it's cumbersome to pass a bunch of env variables using -e key=value syntax, but this is how I prefer to do it. Remember the variables are still exposed to anyone with access to the Docker daemon. If your docker run command is composed programmatically it's easier.
If not, use the --env-file flag as discussed here in the Docker docs. You create a file with key=value pairs, then run a container using that file.
$ cat >> myenv << END
FOO=BAR
BAR=BAZ
END
$ docker run --env-file myenv
That myenv file can be created using chef/config management as described above.
If you're hosting on AWS you can leverage KMS here. Keep either the env file or the config file (that is passed to the container in a volume) encrypted via KMS. In the container, use a wrapper script to call out to KMS, decrypt the file, move it in to place and start the app. This way the config data is not exposed on disk.