Elasticsearch - Securing software while maintaining usability

Elasticsearch Securing a search engine while maintaining usability Alexander Reelsen @spinscale alex@elastic.co

Elastic Stack

Elasticsearch in 10 seconds Search Engine (FTS, Analytics, Geo), near real-time Distributed, scalable, highly available, resilient Interface: HTTP & JSON Centrepiece of the Elastic Stack (Kibana, Logstash, Beats, APM, ML, App Search, Enterprise Search) Uneducated conservative guess: Tens of thousands of clusters worldwide, hundreds of thousands of instances

Agenda Security: Feature or non-functional requirement? Security Manager Production Mode vs. Development Mode Plugins Scripting language: Painless

Security Feature or non-functional requirement?

Software has to be secure! O RLY? Defensive programming Do not persist specific data (PCI DSS) Not exploitable (pro tip: not gonna happen) No unintended resource access (directory traversal) Least privilege principle Reduced impact surface (DoS) https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/26/miele_joins_internetofst_hall_of_shame/ Security as a non-functional requirement

Security as a feature Authentication Authorization (LDAP, users, PKI) TLS transport encryption Audit logging SSO/SAML/Kerberos

Security or safety or resiliency? Integrity checks Preventing OOMEs Prevent deep pagination Do not expose credentials in cluster state/REST APISs Stop writing data before running out of disk space Unable to call System.exit

„[T]HERE ARE KNOWN KNOWNS; THERE ARE THINGS WE KNOW WE KNOW. WE ALSO KNOW THERE ARE KNOWN UNKNOWNS; THAT IS TO SAY WE KNOW THERE ARE SOME THINGS WE DO NOT KNOW. BUT THERE ARE ALSO UNKNOWN UNKNOWNS – THERE ARE THINGS WE DO NOT KNOW WE DON’T KNOW.“ Donald Rumsfeld, former secretary of defense, IT Security Expert

„[T]HERE ARE KNOWN KNOWNS; THERE ARE THINGS WE KNOW WE KNOW. WE ALSO KNOW THERE ARE KNOWN UNKNOWNS; THAT IS TO SAY WE KNOW THERE ARE SOME THINGS WE DO NOT KNOW. BUT THERE ARE ALSO UNKNOWN UNKNOWNS – THERE ARE THINGS WE DO NOT KNOW WE DON’T KNOW.“ Donald Rumsfeld, former secretary of defense, IT Security Expert

„[T]HERE ARE KNOWN KNOWNS; THERE ARE THINGS WE KNOW WE KNOW. WE ALSO KNOW THERE ARE KNOWN UNKNOWNS; THAT IS TO SAY WE KNOW THERE ARE SOME THINGS WE DO NOT KNOW. BUT THERE ARE ALSO UNKNOWN UNKNOWNS – THERE ARE THINGS WE DO NOT KNOW WE DON’T KNOW.“ Donald Rumsfeld, former secretary of defense, IT Security Expert

„[T]HERE ARE KNOWN KNOWNS; THERE ARE THINGS WE KNOW WE KNOW. WE ALSO KNOW THERE ARE KNOWN UNKNOWNS; THAT IS TO SAY WE KNOW THERE ARE SOME THINGS WE DO NOT KNOW. BUT THERE ARE ALSO UNKNOWN UNKNOWNS – THERE ARE THINGS WE DO NOT KNOW WE DON’T KNOW.“ Donald Rumsfeld, former secretary of defense, IT Security Expert

Security Manager Have you ever called System.setSecurityManager()?

What is a sandbox? connect 192.168.1.1:9300 Your code write /var/log/elasticsearch.log unlink /var/lib/elasticsearch/… ✅ ✅ ✅

What is a sandbox? open /etc/passwd Your code connect bitcoin-miner.foo.bar unlink /var/lib/elasticsearch ⛔ ⛔ ⛔

What is a sandbox? sandbox ✅ Your code ⛔

Introduction Sandbox your java application Prevent certain calls by your application Policy file grants permissions FilePermission (read, write) SocketPermission (connect, listen, accept) URLPermission, PropertyPermission, …

Java Security Manager Java Security Manager Java Program Policy

Java Security Manager Java Security Manager Policy FilePermission read /etc/elasticsearch Java Program FilePermission write /var/log/elasticsearch SocketPermission connect *

Java Security Manager Java Security Manager Policy Java Program

Introduction

Introduction

DEMO

OHAI JLS https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jls/se11/html/jls-17.html#jls-17.5.3

Drawbacks Hardcoded policies before startup DNS lookups are cached forever by default Forces you to think about dependencies! Many libraries are not even tested with the security manager, unknown code paths may be executed No OOM protection! No stack overflow protection! Granularity No protection against java agents

Reducing impact Bad things have less bad results

Reducing impact Elasticsearch integration of the Java Security Manager Least privilege principle Do not run as root No chance of forking a process Do not expose sensitive settings

Security Manager in Elasticsearch Initialization required before starting security manager Elasticsearch needs to read its configuration file first to find out about the file paths Native code needs to be executed first Solution: Start with empty security manager, bootstrap, apply secure security manager

Elasticsearch startup JVM Startup time

JVM Startup Elasticsearch startup time Read configuration file

time Read configuration file JVM Startup Elasticsearch startup Native system calls

time Native system calls Read configuration file JVM Startup Elasticsearch startup Set security manager

time Set security manager Native system calls Read configuration file JVM Startup Elasticsearch startup Load plugins

time Load plugins Set security manager Native system calls Read configuration file JVM Startup Elasticsearch startup Bootstrap checks

time Bootstrap checks Load plugins Set security manager Native system calls Read configuration file JVM Startup Elasticsearch startup Network enabled

time Network enabled Bootstrap checks Load plugins Set security manager Native system calls Read configuration file JVM Startup Elasticsearch startup

Security Manager in Elasticsearch Special security manager is used Does not set exitVM permissions, only a few special classes are allowed to call Thread & ThreadGroup security is enforced Also SpecialPermission was added, a special marker permission to prevent elevation by scripts

Security Manager in Elasticsearch ESPolicy allows for loading from files plus dynamic configuration (from the ES configuration file) Bootstrap check for java.security.AllPermission

#noroot there is no reason to run code as root!

time Network enabled Bootstrap checks Load plugins Set security manager Native system calls Read configuration file JVM Startup Do not run as root

Do not run as root

seccomp … or how I loved to abort system calls

time Network enabled Bootstrap checks Load plugins Set security manager Native system calls Read configuration file JVM Startup Seccomp - prevent process forks

Seccomp - prevent process forks Security manager could fail Elasticsearch should still not be able to fork processes One way transition to tell the operating system to deny execve, fork, vfork, execveat system calls Works on Linux, Windows, Solaris, BSD, osx

Seccomp - prevent process forks

Seccomp - prevent process forks

seccomp sandbox seccomp ✅ Your code ⛔

DEMO

Production mode vs Development mode Annoying you now instead of devastating you later

time Network enabled Bootstrap checks Load plugins Set security manager Native system calls Read configuration file JVM Startup Bootstrap checks

Is your dev setup equivalent to production? Development environments are rarely setup like production ones How to ensure certain preconditions in production but not for development? What is a good indicator?

Mode check

Bootstrap checks

Bootstrap checks

Bootstrap checks

Plugins … remaining secure

time Network enabled Bootstrap checks Load plugins Set security manager Native system calls Read configuration file JVM Startup Bootstrap checks

Plugins in 60 seconds plugins are just zip files each plugin can have its own jars/dependencies each plugin is loaded with its own classloader each plugin can have its own security permissions ES core loads a bunch of code as modules (plugins that ship with Elasticsearch)

Plugins & modules Java Security Manager Policy Elasticsearch Plugin

Plugins & modules Java Security Manager Elasticsearch Plugin Policy

Plugins & modules Elasticsearch Module Elasticsearch Plugin Policy Policy Elasticsearch Module Policy

Sample permissions

Sample permissions

Sample permissions

Introducing Painless A scripting language for Elasticsearch

Scripting: Why and how? Expression evaluation without needing to write java extensions for Elasticsearch Node ingest script processor Search queries (dynamic requests & fields) Aggregations (dynamic buckets) Templating (Mustache)

Scripting in Elasticsearch MVEL Groovy Expressions Painless

Painless - a secure scripting language Hard to take an existing programming language and make it secure, but remain fast Sandboxing Whitelisting over blacklisting, per method Opt-in to regular expressions Prevent endless loops Detect self references to prevent stack overflows

DEMO

Summary Security is hard - let’s go shopping!

Summary Not using the Security Manager - what’s your excuse? Scripting is important, is your implementation secure? Use operating system features! If you allow for plugins, remain secure! If you remove features, have alternatives!

Summary Development has big impact on security Operations is happy to help what is there out of the box Developers know their application best! Don’t reinvent, check out existing features! Developers are responsible for writing secure code! Before something happens!

Thanks for listening! Questions? Alexander Reelsen @spinscale alex@elastic.co

Resources

Resources

Resources https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/ https://www.elastic.co/blog/bootstrap_checks_annoying_instead_of_devastating https://www.elastic.co/blog/scripting https://www.elastic.co/blog/scripting-security https://docs.oracle.com/javase/9/security/toc.htm https://docs.oracle.com/javase/9/security/permissions-java-development-kit.htm https://www.elastic.co/blog/seccomp-in-the-elastic-stack https://github.com/spinscale/talk-elasticsearch-security-manager-and-seccomp

Bonus register all your settings

Mark sensitive settings

Register all your settings

Bonus deep pagination vs search_after

Pagination: Request N C Find the first 10 results for Elasticsearch

Pagination: Request N C Find the first 10 results for Elasticsearch

Pagination: Request N N N C N N Find the first 10 results for Elasticsearch

Pagination: Query Phase N N SortedPriorityQueue size = 50 N C N N Each node returns 10 results, create real top 10 out of 50

Pagination: Fetch phase N N N C N N ask for the real top 10

Pagination: Query Phase N N N C N N return real top 10

Pagination: Query N N N C N N Find the 10 results starting at position 90

Pagination: Query Phase N N SortedPriorityQueue size = 500 N C N N Each node returns 100 results, create real top 90-100 out of 500

Pagination: Query N N N C N N Find the 10 results starting at position 99990

Pagination: Query Phase N N SortedPriorityQueue size = 500000 N C N N Each node returns 100k results

Pagination: Query 1 N N C N 100 Find the 10 results starting at position 99990 over 100 nodes

Pagination: Query 1 N SortedPriorityQueue size = 10_000_000 N C N 100 Each node returns 100k results

Solution: search_after Do not use numerical positions Use keys where you stopped in the inverted index Let the client tell you what the last key was Just specify the last sort value from the last document returned as a starting point

Pagination: search_after 1 N N C N 100 Find the 10 results starting at sort key name foo over 100 nodes

Pagination: search_after 1 N SortedPriorityQueue size = 1000 N C N 100 Each node returns 10 results

Bonus replacing delete by query

delete_by_query removal/replace delete_by_query API was not safe API endpoint was removed extensive documentation was added what to do instead infrastructure for long running background tasks was added delete_by_query was reintroduced using above infra and doing the exact same thing as in the documentation data > convenience!

Thanks for listening! Questions? Alexander Reelsen @spinscale alex@elastic.co