Security is more critical than ever with new computing environments in the cloud and expanding access to the internet. There are a number of security protection mechanisms available for MongoDB to ensure you have a stable and secure architecture for your deployment. We'll walk through general security threats to databases and specifically how they can be mitigated for MongoDB deployments. Topics will include general security tools, how to configure those for MongoDB, and security features available in MongoDB such as LDAP, SSL, x.509 and Authentication.

1. Securing Your MongoDB
Deployment
Andreas Nilsson
Lead Security Engineer, MongoDB

2. The Art of Securing a System
“If you know the enemy and know yourself,
you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.
If you know yourself but not the enemy,
for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.
If you know neither the enemy nor yourself,
you will succumb in every battle.”
Sun Tzu, The Art of War 500 BC

3. Securing the Application: Agenda
Securing a Database Access Control
Data Protection Auditing

4. How can we make data accessible
securely?

5. Timeline
Plan and design security as early as possible.
Design Implement Test Deploy
YES! NO!

6. Designing the Infrastructure

7. Access Control
Configure Authentication and Authorization.
Design Implement Test Deploy

8. MongoDB configuration
Authentication -Who are you in MongoDB?
• Application user, administrator, backup job,
monitoring agent.
Authorization -What can you do in MongoDB?
• CRUD operations, configure the database,
manage sharding, user management.

9. Enable Authentication
Built-in authentication methods
• Password challenge response
• x.509 certificates
Or integrate with existing authentication infrastructure

10. Enable Access Control
Design
• Determine which types of users exist in the system.
• Match the users to MongoDB roles. Create any
customized roles.
Deployment
• Start/restart MongoDB with access control enabled.
• Create the desired users.

11. Role Based Access Control
Builtin roles
• read, readWrite, dbAdmin, clusterAdmin, root, etc..
User defined roles
• Customized roles based on existing roles and privileges.

12. Internal Authentication
Server-server authentication use shared keyfile or x.509.

13. Sharding, upgrading and other fancy
topics
Users in a sharded system
• live on the config servers, not the query routers (mongos)
• local shard (replica set) users can still exist
Users in 2.4
• located in different DBs and in a different format than:
Users in >= 2.6
• all reside in the admin DB and hence are always
replicated.

14. Field Level Redaction - $redact
$redact
• New aggregation framework operator
• Conditionally filter user documents
Use cases
• Implement user-based document level, content filtering.
• Create egress filter, redacting sensitive information.

15. Access Control - Field Level Redaction
Note: Need to understand the application better

16. Data Protection
Encrypting data in transit (SSL) and data at rest.
Design Implement Test Deploy

17. Data Protection End to End

18. Transport Encryption with SSL
• Possible to protect client-server, server-server communications with
SSL.
• Support for commercially and internally issued x.509 certificates
• Possible to run the server in FIPS 140-2 mode.
• Support for mixed SSL and non-SSL clusters.
• Self-signed certificates provides no trust!
• Omitting to provide a CA file to MongoDB disables validation!

19. Data Protection - Transport Encryption
Encrypt communications (SSL)
Authenticate connections (x.509)

20. Data Protection - Encryption at rest
Alternatives
• Encrypt data client side
• Use partner or independent solution for file and OS level
encryption

21. Security Auditing

22. The Audit Log
• Security events can be written to either the console, the
syslog
or a file (JSON/BSON)
• By default, all security events are written to audit log
when enabled.
• Events include Authentication failures and some
commands.
• Access control is not required for auditing.
• They are separate components.

23. Audit Log Properties
• Can filter based off of different criteria
– Action Type, TimeFrame, IP Address/Port, Users
• Events Have Total Order Per Connection
• Audit Guarantees (AKA Writes/config)
– Audit event written to disk BEFORE writing to the
journal
– A write will not complete before it has been audited

24. Some final tips…

25. Some tips along the way…
1. Do not directly expose database servers to the Internet
2. Design and configure access control
3. Enable SSL
4. Provide SSL CA files to the client and server as trust
base
5. Disable any unnecessary interfaces
6. Lock down database files and minimize account
privileges

26. What did we talk about?
Securing a Database Access Control
Data Protection Auditing

27. The Art of Securing a System
“All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer,
but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory
is evolved.”
Sun Tzu, The Art of War 500 BC

28. Next steps
• MongoDB Security Manual -
http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/core/security-introduction/
• MongoDB Security Whitepaper -
http://info.mongodb.com/rs/mongodb/images/MongoDB_Security_Archi
tecture_WP.pdf

29. Thank You
Andreas Nilsson
Lead Security Engineer, MongoDB