Secure MongoDB Over Public Internet - node.js

Question

With the recent attacks on Mongo databases, I've seen many guides on how to password-protect your database. I've gone through each guide and I've set up a 'superAdmin' with root role and another basicAdmin with read/write privileges. I reboot mongo using
mongo --auth
and authenticate using my superAdmin login, however this causes problems for my site which uses this db. When I boot my Node app, I can't access any pages as it cannot connect to the database because it has auth enabled. If in my config/database.js file I have:
module.exports = {
'database': 'mongodb://myWebsite.com/myDatabase'
};
How can I allow my site to access my MongoDB and read/write as users signup but also restrict any ransomware group from just walking in and dropping every collection over and over?

Answer 1

There are three main methods that you can use to protect your database.
Username and password
This is the simpler one. As you have mentioned that you have already secured the server using password, you can simply connect to database using mongoose as
mongoose.connect('mongodb://username:password#host:port/database');
I might recommend here that you change the default port of mongoDb to something else. Changing port can be found in file /etc/mongodb.conf.
Bind to private ip and use firewall
Again refering to file /etc/mongodb.conf change bind_ip to local ip of your network. Most of the services do provide that. Also better to setup firewall for the same. Simple firewall that you can use is UFW. Only allow traffic from servers that you are using. This method might not be effective if you are using shared vpn service.
SSH tunnel to access database
This is far most the most reliable method and i would recommend you to use this with the last method. Here is how this works. Set bind_ip to 127.0.0.1. Let us assume that you are running port on 5000. In order to set up a tunnel use
ssh \
-L 4000:localhost:5000 \
-i ~/.ssh/key \
<username>#mongo_db_ip
Remember to add your ssh key in instance running mongodb database. The above command should be issued on server that is running nodejs. 5000 as mentioned is the remove port and 4000 is the local port that you need to connect to on mongodb. So your command in mongoose to connect to database would be
mongoose.connect('mongodb://localhost:4000/<database>');
Summary
As you can see in almost all the steps i have focused on setting up a firewall which is very important.
Also username and passwords should be avoided and it is better to use ssh keys. From practical experience they also reduce a lot of burden while you are scaling up your service.
Hope this helps you out.