Lead Security Engineer, MongoDB

Andreas Nilsson

Securing Your MongoDB Deployment

The Art of Securing a System

“If you know the enemy and know yourself,

you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.

If you know yourself but not the enemy,

for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.

If you know neither the enemy nor yourself,

you will succumb in every battle.”

Sun Tzu, The Art of War 500 BC

Securing the Application: Agenda

Securing a Database Access Control

Data Protection Auditing

How can we make data accessible securely?

Timeline

Plan and design security as early as possible.

ImplementDesign Test Deploy

YES! NO!

Designing the Infrastructure

Access Control

Configure Authentication and Authorization.

ImplementDesign Test Deploy

MongoDB configuration

Authentication - Who are you in MongoDB?

• Application user, administrator, backup job,

monitoring agent.

Authorization - What can you do in MongoDB?

• CRUD operations, configure the database,

manage sharding, user management.

Enable Authentication

Built-in authentication methods

• Password challenge response

• x.509 certificates

Or integrate with existing authentication

infrastructure

Enable Access Control

Design

• Determine which types of users exist in the system.

• Match the users to MongoDB roles. Create any

customized roles.

Deployment

• Start/restart MongoDB with access control enabled.

• Create the desired users.

Role Based Access Control

Builtin roles

• read, readWrite, dbAdmin, clusterAdmin, root, etc..

User defined roles

• Customized roles based on existing roles and

privileges.

 Internal Authentication

Server-server authentication use shared keyfile

or x.509.

Sharding, upgrading and other fancy topics

Users in a sharded system

• live on the config servers, not the query routers (mongos)

• local shard (replica set) users can still exist

Users in 2.4

• located in different DBs and in a different format than:

Users in >= 2.6

• all reside in the admin DB and hence are always

replicated.

Field Level Redaction - $redact

$redact

• New aggregation framework operator

• Conditionally filter user documents

Use cases

• Implement user-based document level, content

filtering.

• Create egress filter, redacting sensitive

information.

Access Control - Field Level Redaction

Note: Need to understand the application better

Data Protection

Encrypting data in transit (SSL) and data at rest.

ImplementDesign Test Deploy

Data Protection End to End

Transport Encryption with SSL

• Possible to protect client-server, server-server communications

with SSL.

• Support for commercially and internally issued x.509 certificates

• Possible to run the server in FIPS 140-2 mode.

• Support for mixed SSL and non-SSL clusters.

• Self-signed certificates provides no trust!

• Omitting to provide a CA file to MongoDB disables validation!

Data Protection - Transport EncryptionEncrypt communications (SSL)

Authenticate connections (x.509)

Data Protection - Encryption at rest

Alternatives

• Encrypt data client side

• Use partner or independent solution for file and

OS level encryption

Security Auditing

The Audit Log

• Security events can be written to either the

console, the syslog

or a file (JSON/BSON)

• By default, all security events are written to

audit log when enabled.• Events include Authentication failures and

some commands.

• Access control is not required for auditing.• They are separate components.

Audit Log Properties

• Can filter based off of different criteria– Action Type, TimeFrame, IP Address/Port,

Users

• Events Have Total Order Per Connection

• Audit Guarantees (AKA Writes/config)– Audit event written to disk BEFORE writing to

the journal– A write will not complete before it has been

audited

Some final tips…

Some tips along the way…

1. Do not directly expose database servers to the

Internet

2. Design and configure access control

3. Enable SSL

4. Provide SSL CA files to the client and server as

trust base

5. Disable any unnecessary interfaces

6. Lock down database files and minimize account

privileges

What did we talk about?

Securing a Database Access Control

Data Protection Auditing

The Art of Securing a System

“All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer,

but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.”

Sun Tzu, The Art of War 500 BC

Next steps

• MongoDB Security Manual -

http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/core/security-introduction

/

• MongoDB Security Whitepaper -

http://info.mongodb.com/rs/mongodb/images/MongoDB_Se

curity_Architecture_WP.pdf

Lead Security Engineer, MongoDB

Andreas Nilsson

Thank You