We're planning a secure Node.JS server, which uses several third-party web services. Each requires credentials that will need to be configured by the operations team.
Clearly they could simply put them in plain text in a configuration file.
Microsoft .NET seems to offer a better option with DPAPI (Data Protection API) - see Credential storage best practices. Is there a way to make this available through IISNode? Or is there any other option to secure such credentials within Node-JS configuration?
There's an extensive discussion of several options here, including the two suggested by xShirase:
http://pmuellr.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/keeping-secrets-secret.html
User-defined services solves the problem, but only for Cloud Foundry.
This blog http://encosia.com/using-nconf-and-azure-to-avoid-leaking-secrets-on-github/ points out that you can often set environment variables separately on servers, and suggests using nconf to read them and config files separately.
I still wonder if there are specials for IIS?
There is 2 ways to do it securely :
First one is to use command line parameters when you launch your app.
These parameters are then found in process.argv
So, node myapp.js username password would give you :
process.argv[0]=node
process.argv[1]=/.../myapp.js (absolute path)
process.argv[2]=username
process.argv[3]=password
Second is to set the credentials as ENV variables. It is generally considered as the best practice as only you have access to these variables.
You would have to set the variables using the export command, than you'd access it in process.env
I currently had to do the exact same thing for my External API credentials. this is what i did
install node-config module
create a folder and file called config/config.js
here require(config) module
In local box it reads the configuation from local.json file
i have dummy values in local.json for api key and shared secret
on my QA environment i export two variables NODE_ENV="QA" and NODE_CONFIG_DIR="path to my configuation folder on qa server"
node-config module reads configuation from "path to your config folder / QA.json"
now i have real api key and credential in QA.json
here you can use an encryption to encrypt these values and put it back in QA.json
in your app get these config values and decrypt use it in your rest call
hope this helps.
so your config can live in the same container as node code.
refer to this for encryption and decryption
http://lollyrock.com/articles/nodejs-encryption/
Related
I'm currently integrating a monitoring solution for my Angular Frontend app. TO do that, the monitoring provider requires a script to be present in the index.html. However, that script contains sensitive data such as API_KEY, LICENSE_KEY, etc.
My Question is: What is the best & secure way to handle those secrets?
Thanks in adavance
My current idea is to inject those secrets into the script in the build proccess to avoid having them hardcoded in the commited code.
When deploying a ReactJS + NodeJS application, what do you do about environment variables used on the React-side? Running NPM BUILD folds any secret API keys into the final code, making it visible to anyone who inspects the source code. Moving the .evn information to a .env file located server-side before using the npm build command doesn't solve the issue. I've tried to search around but I can't find any actual solutions.
Thanks!
You cannot make secret keys invisible on the client side. Even receiving it as an environment variable from the server, the keys will be incorporated into the build and will be publicly accessible.
So that your React app is not vulnerable, (correcting: not the only way) a possibility is to save keys and secrets in the backend. That is, the backend is the only one with access to keys and secrets. Client makes requests without storing sensitive data.
Thanks folks, all extremely helpful! I'll be moving the secret keys to the server side and changing the way my code works to compensate the adjustment. The other issue was Google Maps API, which can't be moved in the code but can be restricted to specific IP or URL use in the Google Cloud Platform.
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/maps-platform/google-maps-platform-best-practices-restricting-api-keys
First off, I know we dont have ConnectionStrings and AppSettings per se in .Net core, but in my case I want to encrypt a ConnectionString and maybe some other application configurations stored in my appsettings.json (or other settings file).
I know this has been discussed alot all over the internet, but no one seems to have a legit answer..
So suggestions that has beeen thrown out there are:
Using EnvironmentConfigurationBuilder, however... that doesnt really solve the issue, since we just moved our plain text configurations from appsettings.json to the Env-variables)
Create a custom ConfigurationProvider that encrypts and decrypts the appsettings.json (or selective parts of it), however.. that doesnt solve the issue either, since we need to store our key(s) for the decryption somewhere accessible by our application, and even if we did store the key as a "hard-coded" string in our application, a "hacker" could simply just de-compile it.
Someone also mentioned that even if you do encrypt the appsettings.json, a "hacker" could always just do a memory dump and find the decrypted version of the data.. Im no expert on that field, so Im not sure how likely or how complicated such as thing would be.
Azure Key Vault has also been mentioned a few times, however.. in my case and in alot of cases when working with authorities, this is not an option since cloud-services are not allowed.
I might be overthinking this, since if an attacker/hacker actually has managed to get into our server, then we might have bigger issues.. but what would be the way to deal with this issue? Do you simply dont care and leave it all as "plain text"? Or should you take some sort if action and encrypt or obscure the secrets?
You don't need to encrypt connection strings from your config file because the best way is still to NOT store this information in your config files but as environment variables on your server.
In your appsettings.json file just store your local development connection string. For other environments, on the server it is deployed set an environment variable with __ (double underscore) for each child node in you config file.
You can read how this works on this page
If you have a config file as follow
{
"ConnectionStrings": {
"default": "Server=192.168.5.1; Database=DbContextFactorySample3; user id=database-user; password=Pa$$word;"
}
}
On a Windows server you would set the value like this
set "ConnectionStrings__default=Server=the-production-database-server; Database=DbContextFactorySample2; Trusted_Connection=True;"
I don't know how is your deployment flow and tools you're using but it's worth digging into it and find how you can use of this feature.
For example if you're deploying on Kubernetes you could use Helm to set your secret values.
At my company on TFS we create a Release pipeline and make use of the variables section to set the secret values. These values will then be used when the code is deployed on Kubernetes.
Variables in Release pipelines in TFS can be hidden like passwords and no developer can see the production values. Only administrators can
I'm relatively new to Node.js and Express and I was following a guide on adding authentication using JWT to my site found here: Medium. I'm confused by one point of this guide, about using secrets, that says:
This secret will be read by JWT library while creating and validating tokens. In production, we need to store this secret in environment variable instead of a file.
In the guide, they placed the secret inside a config file. I wish the guide described why exactly the JWT secret should be an environment variable instead of in a config file, but it's pretty vague. So why should secrets be environment variables, and what are other best practices for using secrets? I've decided to use Passport & Express Sessions for authentication instead of JWT, but I'd think it still applies to session secrets.
My next question is how would I exactly set a secret in an environment variable? I'm not using the guide anymore, but how would somebody that is using it convert that config file into an environment variable? And lastly, what do you usually use environment variables for in a typical Node.js app?
Why should a secret be an environment variable, instead of being stored in a config file?
While working on projects, you will end up uploading your code on github, which is accessible to everyone. If you store your secrets in a config file, anybody with a github account will be able to read it, and hence it is a security risk. Storing the secrets as environment variables ensure their safe-keeping. Your config file should read these values from the process.env object. Something like this:
const jwtSecretKey = process.env.JWT_SECRET_KEY;
const googleApiKey = process.env.GOOGLE_API_KEY;
const serverPort = process.env.PORT || 8000; // 8000 is the default value in case if the env variable has not been set
module.exports = {
jwtSecretKey: jwtSectetKey,
googleApiKey: googleApiKey,
serverPort: serverPort
}
And any other piece of code using these secrets should require the config file.
const config = require('./config');
...
jwt.verify(token, config.jwtSecretKey);
Along with storing secrets as environment variables, you should also store any environment specific values as environment variables. For example, say your NodeJS server (thats is connected to a hosted Database) is run on three environments - Development, QA and PROD. Each of these environments will have different information regarding the DB HOST and PORT, the environment should connect to. Environment Variables are a good way to store the DB Host and Port on each individual environment, and to use the same code across all environments to connect to different databases by reading the environment variable.
How to store the values as environment variables - One way of doing it is manually, though I wouldn't recommend it. One way is use of shell scripts. It actually depends upon your infrastructure.
You should also add your *.env to the .gitignore file So pushing it to the public will ignore the file and you have only one file with all the environment variables.
Maybe the original question was more about why you should not hard-code secrets into your codebase? Hopefully that is fairly obvious to most people. So ideally your secret and non secret "app config" should live separate from your codebase making your app "configurable". The standard way to do this:
have a development config file (e.g. config.js or .env) that is added to .gitignore so it is never checked in.
have a development sample config file (e.g. config.sample.js or sample.env) for new developers to use as a template for their own development configs (this is checked in and does not contain real secrets).
in production deployment this config file is generated or provisioned with production config and secrets by the devops team.
the path to the config file (location of file is not a secret) might be specified by an environment variable for the app process.
If you are concerned about security you won't put secrets into ENV.
(Yes, I know this is a controversial topic for some people. Sorry.)
You can't really prevent unprivileged users from getting access to ENV information. So if you put secrets in env, the bar is lowered for an attacker because they don't necessarily need a privileged account to see your app's secrets running under a different user.
if your app spawns any subprocesses, your secrets will be exposed to them because they inherit your environment.
if you have debug process logging at a system level, process ENV can be exposed to unprivileged users because the system doesn't consider ENV to be secret.
If you are provisioning a production server, you can just as easily put your secrets in a .env file as a systemd EnvironmentFile using the familiar environment variable format.
However the trick is you want to treat this as secret app-loaded config rather than loading it into process environment (via systemd, bash, npm scripts, etc) or process.env within your app.
dotenv by default (when you call .config()) populates process.env. so if you want to use dotenv securely, you can parse your .env config using dotenv.parse so it doesn't put the secrets from your .env into process.env.
This would allow you to provision a .env file with production secrets and use a development .env file that you add to .gitignore so you don't commit your development file. However application developers need to remember to use .parse instead of .config or else it is a security risk.
Alternatively if you don't want to use dotenv since its primary design is focused on loading up ENV... just use a json or js config file that exports a config object (e.g. config.js). Same as .env you can have a dev version that is not committed and a production one that is auto-provisioned. This can be required within the app where needed and avoids the risk (you have with dotenv) of accidentally populating secrets into the environment. Of course bad app code can always still leak secrets, but at least they won't be leaked by default due to how the secrets are exposed to the app.
The downside of all this is that ENV gave us a very standard way to pass config to any type of app/process/script (ie not just nodejs) in production environments. ENV being insecure means we have to come up with a (ideally standard) mechanism for passing secure config to a variety of apps and scripts in production.
In bash (as an example) you can source a .env file and as long as those vars aren't exported they are just "local" variables to the current bash process (ie not inherited by sub-processes). Not using export is akin to not populating process.env. Parsing json config in simple bash scripts...not so fun without helper apps.
You would like application developers to not have to think about production secrets/config or security and give them a standard config retrieval mechanism that works for local development, testing and production.
You would like this standard mechanism to be straight forward and relatively low-risk of them inadvertently opening up security issues on the app side (exposing production secrets to sub-processes). Of course nothing protects you 100% as if the app has access to the secret there are many ways it could leak it (writing to file, making http calls, etc)...but at least it wouldn't be due to the config loading/passing mechanism.
We are currently looking at options for addressing this for a variety of apps in production...so very happy if someone has well thought out suggestions or experience solving this in a clean, general purpose way.
I would be inclined to stick with the .env because we already support EnvironmentFile provisioning and every app can deal with that file format (e.g. can source a .env with bash)...the problem is how to prevent apps/developers from accidentally using dotenv.config instead of dotenv.parse to keep this out of the app environment.
So we are probably just sticking with config.sample.{env,json,js} so the devlops team has a template to populate with production secrets. Config is loaded by the node app via require so it doesn't populate process.env. We also are adding command-line flag (or ENV) to our apps to allow the location of this config file to be specified so devops has the option to place the production config file outside of the app deploy directory (which can make continuous deployment a bit easier). The downside is that a config.js won't work easily for other languages, but devops can fairly easily script converting an ENV style variable format into other targets.
As I said, keeping secrets out of your ENV is for people that are concerned about security. Many blogs/guides/tutorials online show secret passing through ENV. The popularity of dotenv which (by default) loads secrets into the process environment also might lead you to believe this is the right way. Security is always a tradeoff between risk, effort/cost and inconvenience. Personally I think if you auto-provision production it isn't a big deal to fix this...the issue is more about coming up with a semi-standard mechanism that can work across a variety of apps/code-languages.
References:
https://systemd-devel.freedesktop.narkive.com/ibRtoqPS/environment-variable-security
https://github.com/motdotla/dotenv#parse
https://github.com/motdotla/dotenv/pull/378
Currently, I am using environment variables to store API credentials in my nodejs application.
What would be the best practice to store them if I want to change the credentials through a UI during runtime?
Is it possible to alter the environment variables during runtime?
Answering your question, yes, it is possible. The Node.js documentation says this:
The process.env property returns an object containing the user
environment. It is possible to modify this object, but such
modifications will not be reflected outside the Node.js process.
See the doc here: https://nodejs.org/api/process.html#process_process_env
The idea to put the environment variables in a separated file, preciselly to mantain it away from any vulnerability that your app could have, causing third parts not autorized to get that variables. I think, you can do it, but is not a good practice. If it's not avoidable, you should save it encrypted and only be recoberable using an specific key provided by the user.
For example, AWS creates a public private key pair, to manage the access to virtual machine instances EC2. They encrypt the passwords to that instances using the public key, and the user can only recover that password, providing a private key .PEM
See it here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ec2-key-pairs.html