Security Guidelines

Brooklyn Server

Web-console and REST api

Users are strongly encouraged to use HTTPS, rather than HTTP.

The use of LDAP is encouraged, rather than basic auth.

Configuration of "entitlements" is encouraged, to lock down access to the REST api for different users.

Brooklyn user

Users are strongly discouraged from running Brooklyn as root.

For production use-cases (i.e. where Brooklyn will never deploy to "localhost"), the user under which Brooklyn is running should not have sudo rights.

Persisted State

Use of an object store is recommended (e.g. using S3 compliant or Swift API) - thus making use of the security features offered by the chosen object store.

File-based persistence is also supported. Permissions of the files will automatically be 600 (i.e. read-write only by the owner). Care should be taken for permissions of the relevant mount points, disks and directories.

Credential Storage

For credential storage, users are strongly encouraged to consider using the "externalised configuration" feature. This allows credentials to be retrieved from a store managed by you, rather than being stored within YAML blueprints or brooklyn.cfg.

A secure credential store is strongly recommended, such as use of HashiCorp's Vault - see org.apache.brooklyn.core.config.external.vault.VaultExternalConfigSupplier.

Infrastructure Access

Cloud Credentials and Access

Users are strongly encouraged to create separate cloud credentials for Brooklyn's API access.

Users are also encouraged to (where possible) configure the cloud provider for only minimal API access (e.g. using AWS IAM).

VM Image Credentials

Users are strongly discouraged from using hard-coded passwords within VM images. Most cloud providers/APIs provide a mechanism to instead set an auto-generated password or to create an entry in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys (prior to the VM being returned by the cloud provider).

If a hard-coded credential is used, then Brooklyn can be configured with this "loginUser" and "loginUser.password" (or "loginUser.privateKeyData"), and can change the password and disable root login.

VM Users

It is strongly discouraged to use the root user on VMs being created or managed by Brooklyn. SSH-ing on the VM should be done on rare cases such as initial Apache Brooklyn setup, Apache Brooklyn upgrade and other important maintenance occasions.

SSH keys

Users are strongly encouraged to use SSH keys for VM access, rather than passwords.

This SSH key could be a file on the Brooklyn server. However, a better solution is to use the "externalised configuration" to return the "privateKeyData". This better supports upgrading of credentials.

Install Artifact Downloads

When Brooklyn executes scripts on remote VMs to install software, it often requires downloading the install artifacts. For example, this could be from an RPM repository or to retrieve .zip installers.

By default, the RPM repositories will be whatever the VM image is configured with. For artifacts to be downloaded directly, these often default to the public site (or mirror) for that software product.

Where users have a private RPM repository, it is strongly encouraged to ensure the VMs are configured to point at this.

For other artifacts, users should consider hosting these artifacts in their own web-server and configuring Brooklyn to use this. See the documentation for org.apache.brooklyn.core.entity.drivers.downloads.DownloadProducerFromProperties.