How to pass password\encryption key to Heroku application - spring-boot

I'm deploying my Spring boot application into Heroku server via git deployment. There are passwords and api secrets in my application.yml. Those properties are encrypted with Jasypt. One thing I don't understand is: how to pass jasypt decryption password into deployed application for startup?
Heroku has Config Vars, but they do not seem secure, considering that all of them could be revealed on the dashboard
Is there a secure way to send a password into deployment?

the Config Vars is the accepted mechanism to pass runtime information to the apps upon deployment;
It is pretty secure if the access to the Dashboard is controlled of course (those settings are never exposed or logged), only the owner can reveal the values.

Related

How to Store Certificate Files Securely in Spring Cloud Config Server?

I have a .pfx file that I use for communicating with a web service. I load it from classpath in development environment like this:
application.yml
my-config:
certificate: classpath:/certificate/dev/mycertificate.pfx
Service.java
SSLContext sslContext = SSLContext.getInstance(SSL_CONTEXT_PROTOCOL);
KeyManagerFactory keyManagerFactory = KeyManagerFactory.getInstance(KeyManagerFactory.getDefaultAlgorithm());
KeyStore keystore = KeyStore.getInstance("JKS");
Resource certificateResource = myConfig.getCertificate();
keystore.load(certificateResource.getInputStream(), myConfig.getCertPassword().toCharArray());
certificateResource.getInputStream().close()
keyManagerFactory.init(keystore, myConfig.getCertPassword().toCharArray());
sslContext.init(keyManagerFactory.getKeyManagers(), null, null);
requestContext.put(SSL_SOCKET_FACTORY, sslContext.getSocketFactory());
This works fine in development environment. The problem is, I do not want to just push the certificate resource to git repo. Also I cannot put the file inside the server because we use pivotal application service for hosting the app. So is there any way I can securely store the certificate file in the config server or anywhere else?
Thanks.
You could put the cert into Spring Cloud Config Server. If you are using Spring Cloud Services for VMware Tanzu you can follow these instructions and store the value into CredHub through SCS.
Alternatively, you could store encrypted values in a Git backend and SCS will decrypt them for you. See instructions here. You could also store things in Vault, but Vault is not provided by the SCS for VMware Tanzu tile. You'd have to run your own Vault server. Instructions for using Vault. Both of these options, I feel, are a bit more work than using SCS's support for CredHub.
If you are trying to use only OSS Spring Cloud Config, you can do that too, but it's more work, more than I can cover here. That said, all three of these options are available there as well:
CredHub backend w/SCS.
Git + encrypted properties.
Vault backend w/SCS.
Vault and CredHub both have certificate types specifically for storing certificates. I do not believe SCS exposes these options, so you would be just storing the text representation of your certificate.
All of these options assume that you want to use Spring Cloud Config server. If you wanted an option not tied to Spring, you could use the CredHub Service Broker tile. This allows you to store items in CredHub and then present them as bound services. With it, you could create a bound service that represents your certificate, bind that to the apps that require it, and then fetch your certificate from VCAP_SERVICES like any other bound service.
The downside of this approach is that VCAP_SERVICES is an environment variable, so it's storing text only and there are limits to how much information can be stored.

How to restrict access to a small user community (IAM users) in GCP / Cloud DNS / HTTPS application

I have a request to restrict the access (access control) to a small user community in GCP.
Let me explain the question.
This is the current set up:
A valid GCP Organization: MyOrganization.com (under which the GCP project is deployed / provisioned)
Cloud DNS (To configure domain names, A & TXT records, zones and subdomains to build the URL for the application).
Oauth client set up (tokens, authorized redirects URIs, etc.).
HTTPS load balancer (GKE -managed k8s service- with ingress service), SSL certificate and keys issued by a trusted CA.
The application was built using python + Django framework.
I have already deployed the application (GCP resources) and it is working smooth.
The thing is that, since we are working in GCP, all IAM users who has a valid userID#MyOrgnization.com can access the application (https://URL-for-my-Appl.com).
Now, I have a new request, which consists in restricting access (access control) to the application only for a small user community within that GCP organization.
For example, I need to ensure that only specific IAM users can access the application (https://URL-for-my-Appl.com), such as:
user1#MyOrganization.com
user2#MyOrganization.com
user3#MyOrganization.com
user4#MyOrganization.com
How could I do that, taking into account the info I sent earlier ?
thanks!
You can use Cloud IAP (Identity Aware Proxy) in order to do that.
Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP) lets you manage access to applications
running in App Engine standard environment, App Engine flexible
environment, Compute Engine, and GKE. IAP establishes a central
authorization layer for applications accessed by HTTPS, so you can
adopt an application-level access control model instead of using
network-level firewalls. When you turn on IAP, you must also use
signed headers or the App Engine standard environment Users API to
secure your app.
Note: you can configure it on your load balancer.
It's not clear in your question if your application uses google auth (but considering that you talk about org-restricted login I think so) - if that's the case you should be able to enable it without virtually touching anything in your application if you are using the Users API.
The best and easiest solution is to deploy IAP (Identity Aware Proxy) on your HTTPS Loadbalancer
Then, grant only the user that you want (or create a gsuite user group and grant it, it's often easier to manage)

clould foundry dataflow server basic auth

We are using SCDF on PCF with File-based Authentication, it works fine on a single instance - however when we scale to 2 or more instances, it fails on login stating "Not Logged in" - there's no error message on the server..
Does SCDF store user info in session ? Not sure why login not working when scaled up
SCDF - 1.5.1.RELEASE
(Apparently it was working in 1.3.0.RELEASE)
The file-based authentication is not a recommended approach for cloud platforms like PCF.
In PCF in particular, you'd want to take advantage of the single-sign-on solution provided by the platform. With OAuth and SSO backed by UAA, it'd be a consistent security experience regardless of the number of instances. Please refer to the write-up on authentication options available for SCDF on PCF.
With this, you can centrally also renew an expired OAuth token or even revoke them as needed.
Also, as an FYI, when using the SCDF Tile, all this is automatically configured for you. You'd create an instance of SCDF service from the marketplace and the space-developer can gain access to the Dashboard, REST-APIs, and Shell - all of it works on an SSO model by default.

Is there a way to set a heroku app as private?

Is there a way to set a heroku app as private?
I would like to deploy several internal services at heroku and make them only accessible between themselves. I would like to do it this way to hide the backend from the internet access and only allow a frontend app to be accessed by users from outside.
By default, practically everyone who can guess the correct heroku domain could access the backend and attack it directly.
Update:
To be more specific: I am looking for an altenative way besides Heroku private spaces
No, you cannot do this. What you should do if you need this functionality is to secure your web applications with a protocol like HTTP Basic Auth, or OAuth2 Client Credentials. Either of these will allow you to securely authenticate requests BETWEEN your Heroku apps without leaking data publicly.

securing access to spring cloud configserver

I was wondering how people are handling security aspects when using Spring Cloud Config.
I'm planning to use Spring Cloud Config Server and Client together with Spring Boot. From an implementation point of view this is quite straight, but how do you deal with the risk of disclosing password/access to every developer.
e.g. you run one central configserver containing configurations for all environment. In the bootstrap.yml of the config client app you'll have to configure the username/password to access the configserver. So far so good, but when I know commit the username/password in the respective yml file, then every developer has potential access to all environments by just switching the profile from e.g. development to production (please let's not start a discussion why not every developer needs access to production).
I'm aware that I can encrypt all passwords in the configuration, we do this, but that's not what I'm looking for. Encryption is just a feature to not have the passwords being stored plaintext in the files, but the user does not really need to know the plain password to get access if he has access to the configserver in the first place.
This is also about avoiding mistakes during development... its just to easy to switch the local environment to connect to production or any other environment.
So how are people dealing with this? Do you inject a different bootstrap.yml in development then in other environments? if so how do you administrate/propagate these?
Do you set the password for the configuration user on the comandline?
...?
We use variables and default values for config server URL, user and password
${config_username:user}:${config_password:password}#${config_server:conf.mydomain.com}
Default values can be valid credentials for development environment this way you simply run it while you develop. When you deploy to production simply set those environment variables and your application will connect to a different config server
I was thinking about this myself and came up with 3 options. In all cases, use {cipher} values in repos for sensitive data and disable various actuator endpoints that would allow decryption or property value lists.
Have two config servers, one for dev and one for prod, with no dev access to the prod server, controlled by credentials provided to the prod client at runtime.
Perform the decryption client side, using a secret provided to the prod client at runtime.
Explicitly define a prod profile and block access to URLs containing that profile from non-prod servers.

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