Orion and Rush - HTTPS notifications over port 443 - fiware

I have been trying to set up an Orion instance which would support subscription notifications to HTTPS (using Rush), but the handling of this seems to be a bit incorrect. Setting the notification url to e.g. https://www.example.com/path/ ends up at Rush as www.example.com:443/path/.
This is unsafe and not up to standards, as such a request could actually avoid https by using the same port over http. In our company we have a proxy set up which refuses such requests as "Bad Request: You're speaking plain HTTP to an SSL-enabled server port". The same error comes up in the Rush consumer output, while direct curl requests to Rush without the port work ok. See this discussion for another argument that the current requests are incorrect: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/46015/speaking-plain-http-over-an-ssl-enabled-server-port. Google refuses such requests as well.
Our proxy is set up to redirect any http requests to https, but these do not work either, as Rush does not seem to follow the redirects.
How can we avoid this issue? Modifying our proxy would be unsafe and not following standards, changing Orion would require recompiling from sources and changing Rush to remove the port would be a bit hacky. Any changes (like adding the port or removing/changing the protocol) to the notification URL do not help.
EDIT: The command to run Orion was:
/usr/bin/contextBroker -port 1026 -logDir /var/log/contextBroker -pidpath /var/log/contextBroker/contextBroker.pid -dbhost localhost -db orion -rush localhost:5001
Rush (v 1.8.3) was installed with default values and Orion was updated from v0.14.1 to v0.23.0.

Since verion 1.7.0, Orion implements native HTTPS notifications (i.e. without needing Rush). This could help to solve the situation described in this question.

Related

How to make ELB pass protocol to node.js process (Elastic Beanstalk)

I have ELB balancing TCP traffic to my Node.js processes. When ELB is balancing TCP connections it does not send the X-Forwarded-Proto header like it does with http connections. But I still need to know if the connection is using SSL/TLS so I can respond with a redirect from my Node process if it is not a secure connection.
Is there a way to make ELB send this header when balancing TCP connections?
Thanks
You can configure proxy protocol for your ELB to get connection related information. In case of HTTP the ELB adds headers telling about the client information, in case of TCP however, AWS ELB simply passes through the headers from the client without any modifications, this causes the back end server to lose client connection information as it is happening in your case.
To enable proxy control for your ELB, you will have to do it via API, there is currently no way to do it via UI.
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ElasticLoadBalancing/latest/DeveloperGuide/enable-proxy-protocol.html
The above doc is a step-by-step guide on how to do this, I don't want to paste the same here as that information might change over time.
EDIT:
As it turns out, Amazon implements Version 1 of the proxy protocol only which does not give away SSL information. It does however give port numbers which was requested by the client and a process can be developed stating something like if the request was over port 443 then it was SSL. I don't like it as it is indirect, requires hardocoding and coordination between devops and developers... seems to be the only way for now...lets hope AWS ELB starts supporting Version 2 of the proxy protocol which does have SSL info soon.

Fiware: how to secure the communication between Orion and Cygnus?

How can we secure the communication between Orion and Cygnus?
How can we use cygnus with a protected Orion (pep is deployed above Orion broker)?
Thanks and best regards.
There are several ways of securing Orion->Cygnus communications:
Co-locate Orion and Cygnus in the same host, so all comunication are through localhost network interface (this solution assumes that the host itslef is properly secured, of course).
Using a firewall (e.g. iptables) so Cygnus port can be reached only from the IP where Orion runs.
Using HTTPS notifications. In order to use this option take into account that:
Cygnus should be able to receive notifications in HTTPS. I'm not fully sure about Cygnus capabilities with this regards, but my colleague #frb could provide more detail.
You need Rush to send notifications in HTTPS with Orion.
You can also explore the posibility of using a PEP proxy for Cygnus. You only need to secure one operation at Cygnus: POST /v1/notifyContext. Have a look to the PEP official documentation.
UPDATE: since verion 1.7.0, Orion implements native HTTPS notifications (i.e. without needing Rush).

Google Cloud Platform Target Pool HTTPS Health Check

I am attempting to use purely https with my compute engine. I have a network load balancer created that forwards to a pool with my instance in it. However, the pool has constantly failing health checks because it won't let me configure a health check that uses https.
I'm using apache to redirect 80 to 443. Does anyone know how to either create an https health check or have the http health check follow the redirect?
Thanks for any help.
--edit--
I finally came across some documentation at http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2015/07/Debugging-Health-Checks-in-Load-Balancing-on-Google-Compute-Engine.html.
Failure 5: Not answering directly with a 200 response code The web server may be configured to redirect to a page that returns an HTTP 200 response code. The health check will not follow the redirect; it expects the health check page to return a 200 directly.
This basic capability has been supported at every other hosting provider we've been on. Why can't this be done? What am I missing?
I spent the whole day trying to configure a purely https based load balancer in GCloud for a Kubernetes cluster with an ingress controller.
I finally got it working, so maybe I share my experience with people that struggle with the same configuration. If the health-check fails for the instances you will usually see the following accessing your websites URL.
Error: Server Error
The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request.
Please try again in 30 seconds.
1) Protocol: GCloud introduced new health checks which can be configured for HTTPS, SSLTCP, SSL, HTTP, HTTPS, or HTTP/2 probing. This can help the original problem to prevent a redirect from port 80 to port 443.
2) Path: The most common issue is a that the "/" path of your application will not return a 200 OK and thus let the health issue fail. This can be prevented by adding a path argument to your health check e.g. "/index".
3) Ingress HTTPS: This is relatively simple. Adding a secret or a pre-shared-cert to your ingress.yaml will automatically result in an HTTPS Load Balancer instead of HTTP. Further information to follow are here
Lastly, the guide from the docs for Setting up HTTP Load Balancing with Ingress .
However, even though the new HTTPS Health checks seem to work, they are still in the beta phase and bugs are reported in the issue tracker. The documentation for the gcloud-ingress-controller can be found here.

WebSocket won't connect to anything other than 127.0.0.1 / localhost

I have a testapp consisting of an HTML5/WebSocket client and an HTTP/WS server. Both servers are in C#; the HTTP server is my own simple thing and the WS server is also homebrew based on concepts from http://nugget.codeplex.com/. HTTP server is listening on 0.0.0.0:5959 and WS server on 0.0.0.0:5960 (accept connections from any client, but on different ports).
My index.html includes some JavaScript that opens a WebSocket to 'ws://'+document.location.hostname+':5960/' (that is, to the same IP address that the webpage came from, but on port 5960). The WS server sends sample data every 100ms. All in all, it's a pretty straightforward demo.
I'm using Chrome 12.0 on Windows7.
I've found that the HTTP server works from any client, either a browser on my machine pointed to 127.0.0.1:5959 or localhost:5959, AND it works when any machine (mine or a remote machine... "remote" being a different PC on my desk :) hits my server machine's work-internal 10-net address 10.122.0.159:5959. Everything works as expected in HTTP land.
However, the WebSocket only works on 127.0.0.1 and localhost; remote machines can successfully fetch HTML from 10.122.0.159:5959 but the WebSocket will NOT connect to 10.122.0.159:5960. In fact, when I point my local browser to it's own 10-net address (10.122.0.159:5959) I get the same result - HTML loads but WebSocket does not connect.
Any ideas as to why this might be happening?
Does CORS require that the WS be using the same port as the HTTP request originated from? If so, is there a special exception to the rule for 127.0.0.1?
Many thanks,
-Dave
Update
It seems to be caused by a proxy server blocking ws:// requests. Our company employs a proxy server for content filtering and all the usual stuff, and our browsers are configured to use it.Chrome uses IE's proxy settings, and IE's default settings are for localhost to not use a proxy server. When I check the box to have local connections also use the proxy server, my ws:// requests to localhost get blocked. Conversely, when I uncheck the "use proxy server" box my server does rx the WS request. Similarly with the remote machine, if I turn off the proxy on the remote machine my server does rx the ws:// request.
So it's a proxy thing, not a CORS or socket thing, and now I'm off to explore proxy settings with our IT folks.
There is no WebSocket limitation on cross-origin except what is governed by the CORS security in the handshake.
It sounds like something is wrong with your WebSocket server and it is only listening on localhost for connections. I would add some debug output to the OnClientConnect routine in Nugget (WebSocketServer.cs) so you can see when socket connections happen. If you really think it isn't a problem with the server then I would suggest using wireshark and comparing the localhost connection to the remote connection.
Also, if you are using the SilverLight WebSocket prototype (README) in IE 9, then you are restricted to ports 4502-4534 for WebSocket connections. It's possible that for localhost this restriction is lifted.
It is/was indeed a proxy thing.
Rather than asking our IT folks to make changes (good luck with that, eh?) I simply turned off proxy for 10.122.0.159 ([Howto for IE/Chrome][1]). I briefly experimented with turning it off for the ws:// protocol but couldn't get it to work, so for now just opening that one IP address does the trick.

Websocket authentication

I'm running a websocket server and asking myself, if it's planed, that clients authentication will be done with handshake in future... draft xxxx maybe :)
Do you have information? I have heard that with draft07 a session id can be sent to server, so maybe that can help to auth the client...
What I'm doing atm is to wait a maximum of 10 seconds, till the clients sends me a message with login header, username and password. But i think this is not "THE" solution. How do you guys out there doing it?
The WebSockets protocol permits standard HTTP authentication headers to be exchanged during the handshake. If you have a WebSockets server that plugs into an existing web server as a module then existing authentication in the web server should already work. Otherwise if you have a standalone WebSockets server then you may need to add the authentication support.
Update
As #Jon points out, unlike normal HTTP/XHR requests, the browser API does not allow you to set arbitrary "X-*" headers for WebSocket connections. The only header value that you can set is the protocol. This is unfortunate. One common solution is to use a ticket based system that relies on existing HTTP mechanism for authorization/authentication and then this ticket is passed along with the websocket connection and validated that way: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/websocket-security