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      Restricting MongoDB’s Network Exposure



      Part of the Series:
      MongoDB Security: Best Practices to Keep Your Data Safe

      MongoDB, also known as Mongo, is a document database used in many modern web applications. As with any database management system, it’s critical that those responsible for managing a Mongo database adhere to the recommended security best practices, both to prevent data from being lost in the event of a disaster and to keep it out of the hands of malicious actors.

      This series of conceptual articles provides a high-level overview of MongoDB’s built-in security features while also highlighting some general database security best practices.

      The most fundamental way you can protect the data you store in MongoDB is to limit network access to the server on which the database is running. One way to do this is to provision a virtual private network (VPN). A VPN presents its connection as if it were a local private network, allowing for secure communications between the servers within it. By running MongoDB behind a VPN, you can block access to any machine that isn’t connected to the same VPN.

      On its own, though, a VPN may not be enough to prevent unauthorized users from accessing your MongoDB installation. For instance, there may be a large number of people who need access to your VPN but only a few of them need access to your Mongo database. You could have more granular control over who has access to your data by setting up a firewall on your database server.

      A firewall provides network security by filtering incoming and outgoing traffic based on a set of user-defined rules. Firewall tools generally allow you to define rules with a high level of precision, giving you the flexibility to grant connections from specific IP addresses access to specific ports on your server. For example, you could write rules that would only allow an application server access to the port on your database server used by a MongoDB installation.

      Another way to limit your database’s network exposure is to configure IP binding. By default, MongoDB is bound only to localhost upon installation. This means that, without further configuration, a fresh Mongo installation will only be able to accept connections that originate from localhost, or the same server on which the MongoDB instance is installed.

      This default setting is secure, since it means the database is only accessible to those who already have access to the server on which it’s installed. However, this setting will cause problems if you need to access the database remotely from another machine. In such cases, you can additionally bind your instance to an IP address or hostname where the remote computer can reach the database server.



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      Leveraging MongoDB’s Built-in Authentication and Authorization Methods



      Part of the Series:
      MongoDB Security: Best Practices to Keep Your Data Safe

      MongoDB, also known as Mongo, is a document database used in many modern web applications. As with any database management system, it’s critical that those responsible for managing a Mongo database adhere to the recommended security best practices, both to prevent data from being lost in the event of a disaster and to keep it out of the hands of malicious actors.

      This series of conceptual articles provides a high-level overview of MongoDB’s built-in security features while also highlighting some general database security best practices.

      Authorization and authentication are two concepts that are critical for understanding database security. These two concepts are similar, but it’s important to understand what they are and what makes them different. Authentication is the process of confirming whether a user or client is actually who they claim to be. Authorization, on the other hand, involves setting rules for a given user or group of users to define what actions they can perform and which resources they can access.

      Authentication

      MongoDB features several mechanisms that allow you to authenticate users, with the default mechanism being its Salted Challenge Response Authentication Mechanism (SCRAM). SCRAM involves MongoDB reading and verifying credentials presented by a user against a combination of their username, password, and authentication database, all of which are known by the given MongoDB instance. If any of the user’s credentials don’t match what the Mongo database expects, the database won’t authenticate the user and they won’t gain access until they present the correct username, password, and authentication database.

      You can also use a text file to act as a shared password for a group of connected MongoDB instances, such as a replica set or shard cluster. This method, known as keyfile authentication, is considered to be a bare-minimum form of security and is best suited for testing or development environments, as advised by the MongoDB documentation.

      For production environments that implement sharding or replication, the MongoDB documentation recommends using another authentication mechanism: x.509 authentication. This involves distributing valid x.509 certificates — either self-signed or obtained from a third-party certificate authority — to the intended cluster members or clients. These are different from keyfiles, though, in that each machine gets its own dedicated x.509 certificate. This means that one machine’s certificate will only be useful for authenticating that machine. A client that presents a stolen x.509 certificate to the database server will not be able to authenticate.

      x.509 authentication leverages a concept known as mutual authentication. This means when a client or cluster member authenticates themself to the server, the server is likewise authenticating itself to the client or cluster member. If the client or cluster member attempts to connect to a database server with an invalid x.509 certificate, it will be prevented from doing so since the mutual authentication will fail.

      Authorization

      MongoDB manages authorization through a computer security concept known as role-based access control. Whenever you create a MongoDB user, you have the option to provide them with one or more roles. A role defines what privileges a user has, including what actions they can perform on a given database, collection, set of collections, or cluster. When you assign a role to a user, that user receives all the privileges of that role.

      MongoDB comes with a number of built-in roles that provide commonly-needed privileges. A few of these are available for every database, but most are only available for the admin database, as they’re intended to provide powerful administrative privileges. For example, you can assign a user the readWrite role on any database, meaning that you can read and modify the data held in any database on your system as long as you’ve granted a user the readWrite role over it. However, the readWriteAnyDatabase role — which allows the user to read and modify data on any database except for local and config — is only available in the admin database, as it provides broader system privileges.

      In addition to its built-in roles, Mongo also allows you to define custom roles, giving you even more control over what resources users can access on your system. Like users, roles are added in a specific database. Other than roles created in the admin database, which can include privileges to any database in the system, a user-defined role’s privileges only apply to the database in which the role was created. With that said, a role can include one or more existing roles in its definition, and a role can inherit privileges from other roles in the same database.

      With such fine-grained control over user privileges, you can set up dedicated users to perform certain functions, like a cluster administrator to manage replica sets and sharded clusters or a user administrator to create and manage users and custom roles. This type of user management strategy can also help harden your system’s security, as it reduces the number of users with broad privileges.



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