We want to set-up an existing API as SAAS using AWS
Our code has been deployed via elastic-beanstalk, and we created access to the methods via Gateway to manage permissions.
We're now trying to log the user's activity, for billing purposes
Currently, the best solution we found involves a full logging of the calls (Enabled CloudWatch Logs + Log full requests/responses data), which looks quite heavy, and may even end up beeing expensive.
We reworked the request body in the integration request, by adding a mapping template for the body, but this seems heavy and complicated, whe hope there was a better solution we missed.
Basically, we replaced the default "passthrough" with a generated basic "passthrough" code, and added a value "MyUserArn" : "$context.identity.userArn" in it, which fills the requests body with a large mess, but looks like "The most reliable way to avoid to breaking something".
We'd like to just add the IAM user identifier in a header, or query string parameter, but failed to find if this is even possible. Several posts mention an "Invoke with caller credentials" option, but we didn't find this either.
Is is something related to cognito or something else ?
Are we doing something wrong ?
You have a couple different options for getting this information, both of which have trade offs:
Your current solution pulling the value from $context.identity in a mapping template and sending to your Lambda as part of the body. It seems like you are opposed to this given your "large mess" comment, but ultimately you have control over the content passed to your Lambda.
Enable "user caller credentials" on your method and then use identity value inside your Lambda. Currently this only works if you've used credentials vended from a Cognito authentication flow and does require that Lambda invocation also be part of your role policy, but doesn't require any modification of the template.
UPDATE Apologies, I somehow missed you were using Beanstalk and not Lambda. You can definitely just add a header to your integration request and simply have pull its value from $context.identity.userArn.
UPDATE 2 Double apologies, when using context variables in headers, you omit the $ so you need to use context.identity.userArn.
Related
I have to implement a Pre Token Generation Lambda in order to add custom attributes into the Access Token. The custom attribute/value is stored in the user settings of each user within the Cognito User Pool and I can retrieve it with the boto3 admin_get_user function.
The question I have is whether it is a good idea to call the admin_get_user (or any other function that loads data from Cognito) from a performance point of view. Does Cognito internally scales and handles a burst of requests well? Or is it better to retrieve the custom attributes from a different place because Cognito is perhaps not meant to be used for such lookups?
My Lambda will be executed on every successful authentication and more importantly, on every token refresh which happens every 60min (given that ever issued access token expires after max 60min)
I know the question is old. I recently faced the same issue. So just adding an answer to help others.
the AdminGetUser documented quota/limit is 5 requests per min. You can request AWS to increase the limit. or You can configure the aws client, you are using to have a back off strategy and retry configuration.
you can find limit or quota for api calls here : https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cognito/latest/developerguide/limits.html
An interesting article on how the backOff strategy work & which one to choose: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/exponential-backoff-and-jitter/
I would recommend https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSJavaSDK/latest/javadoc/com/amazonaws/retry/PredefinedBackoffStrategies.FullJitterBackoffStrategy.html
For more info read https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSJavaSDK/latest/javadoc/com/amazonaws/ClientConfiguration.html
Is there a way to issue access tokens that are valid for a single use? My use case is to invoke Lambda functions from browser but want to restrict the number of invocations to one per token.
If a short lived token is issued then there is still potential for it to be used for multiple invocations.
I am using DeveloperAuthenticatedIdentities to issue the temporary tokens.
There is no such thing with AWS Cognito.
You can implement a custom Authorizer with API Gateway to manage your invocations count. If the same URL accessed more than once, you can deny the service.
More info on Custom Authorizers.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/apigateway/latest/developerguide/use-custom-authorizer.html
Hope it helps.
The AWS Cognito is not designed for that, however you could achieve this by
throwing undesired expensive computation at it:
Your Api/app adds the user on behalf of the admin.
Your api/app removes the confirmed user after certain amount of time.
You could see that this approach is not feasible even for low number of users.
Better approach, if the routes are unique (still using Cognito)
Same as above.
You have the list of routes, as a bucket names, in S3; each has a file
that consists, something like
{
accessed: false
}
If the user uses the token to access the route your app check for the above, grand
the access, and sets it to true. You could even not have the above file and just the
buckets; that represents the routes and gets removed upon being accessed.
Much Better approach
The application could generate/verify, short expiry JWT tokens, for supporting short lived authorized users. The downside here is that the development time which might lead to
security risks if the application is not throughly tested.
2.Same as the above approach (using S3).
For limiting usage, I think the best approach will be using usage plans.
It is not a token responsibility to restrict usage, API Key is there for that purpose.
Have a look at this AWS page.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/apigateway/latest/developerguide/api-gateway-api-usage-plans.html
Please see this:
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/API_Invoke.html
LogType
You can set this optional parameter to Tail in the request
only if you specify the InvocationType parameter with value
RequestResponse. In this case, AWS Lambda returns the base64-encoded
last 4 KB of log data produced by your Lambda function in the
x-amz-log-result header.
Valid Values: None | Tail
So this means any user with valid credentials for invoking a function can also read the logs this function emits?
If so, this is an obvious vulnerability that can give some attacker useful information regarding processing of invalid input.
How do I configure an Amazon AWS Lambda function to prevent tailing the log in the response?
Update 1
1) Regarding the comment: "If a hacker can call your Lambda function, you have
more problems than seeing log files."
Not true: Lambda functions are also meant to be called directly form client code, using the SDK.
As an example, see the picture below from the book "AWS Lambda in Action":
2) Regarding the comment: "How is this a vulnerability exactly? Only someone you have provided AWS IAM credentials would be able to invoke the Lambda function."
Of course, clients do have some credentials, most of the time (for example,
from having signed in to your mobile app with their Facebook account, through Amazon Cognito). Am I supposed to trust all my users?
3) Regarding the comment: "Only if you have put some secure information to be logged."
Logs may contain sensible information. I'm not talking about secure information like passwords, but simply information to help the development team debugging, or the security team finding out about attacks. Applications may log all kinds of information, including why some invalid input failed, which can help an attacker learn what is the valid input. Also, attackers can see all the information the security team is logging about their attacks. Not good. Even privacy may be at risk depending on what you log.
Update 2
It would also solve my problem if I could somehow detect the Tail parameter in the Lambda code. Then I would just fail with a "Tail now allowed" message. Unfortunately the Context object doesn't seem to contain this information.
I think you can't configure AWS Lambda to prevent tailing the log in the response. However, you could use your own logging component instead of using the one provided by Amazon Lambda to avoid the possibility to expose them via the LogType parameter.
Otherwise, I see your point about adding complexity, but using API Gateway is the most common solution to provide the possibility to invoke Lambdas for clients applications that you do not trust.
You're right, not only it's a bad practice, it's obviously (as you already understood) introducing security vulnerabilities.
If you look carefully in the book you will also find this part:
which explains that in order to be more secure, the client requests should hit Amazon API gateway which will expose a clean API interface and which will call the relevant lambda-function without exposing it to the outer-world.
An example of such API is demo'ed in a previous page:
By introducing a middle-layer between the client and AWS-lambda, we take care of authentication, authorization, access and all other points of potential vulnerability.
This is a comment.
While this should be a comment, I am sorry that I do not have yet enough stackoverflow reputation to do so.
Before commenting on this, please note that lambda Invoke may result in more than one execution of your lambda (per AWS documentation)
Invocations occur at least once in response to an event and functions must be idempotent to handle this.
As the LogType is documented as a valid option, I don't think you can prevent it in your backend. However, you need to have a workaround to handle it. I can think of
1- Generate a junk 4KB tail log (by console.log() for example). Then, the attacker will get a junk info. (incur cost only in case of attacker)
2- Use step functions. This is not only to hide the log but to overcome the problem of 'Invocations occur at least once' and have a predictable execution of your backend. It incurs cost though.
I'm looking through Google Cloud Functions docs and I wonder if it is possible to restrict access to HTTP cloud function to the given network? I would like to avoid anyone to exhaust the free quota.
Is there any firewall rules or similar mechanism for Cloud Functions?
I don't believe there is any in-built security restrictions at the moment.
In terms of avoid quota exhaustion you could pass a header or parameter with some kind of shared secret. Even a fixed string value would help avoid this problem.
You can add authentication to a cloud function by using firebase authentication. Here's a github example of how to do to it: https://github.com/firebase/functions-samples/tree/master/authorized-https-endpoint
Note however that the authentication code is executed by your function, so rejecting unauthorized access would still consume a small portion of your free resource allowance.
The Google Function Authorizer module might be what you're looking for. It provides "a simple user authentication and management system for Google Cloud HTTP Functions." It doesn't seem to have a lot of users yet, but the project seems simple enough that you could at least use it as a basis to modify or implement your own solution if you prefer.
This article was helpful for me.
https://cloud.google.com/solutions/authentication-in-http-cloud-functions
Anyone can still invoke the function but it must contain credentials from a user that has access to the resources accessed by the function.
Before that I was doing something very simple that is probably not great for production but does provide a little bit more security that just leaving it open publicly. I call my function with a password in the payload and if it doesn't match one of the passwords I hardcoded on the function it just fails with a 403.
If you need to restrict to IP range then you can follow instructions here: https://sukantamaikap.com/posts/load-balancing-cloud-functions
The UI of Google Cloud has unfortunately changed and you need to do some searching before you get all done, but I managed to set it up. But note that the related services will cost roughly 25 eur per month at minimum.
You can estimate the pricing here:
https://cloudpricingcalculator.appspot.com/
You need to search for "Cloud Load Balancing and Network Services" and then enable "Cloud Load Balancing", "Google Cloud Armor", and "IP addresses".
Alternatively, in some cases it might be sufficient if you set the name of the function or some suffix to the name complex enough so that it will be effectively like a sort of password. Something like MyGoogleCloudFunc-abracadabra. Then it will not restrict the network but perhaps outsiders would not know the secret name anyway.
What I'm trying to do is catch any image file request and check if that image doesn't exists, return a different image.
I'm taking a look at Lambda and the Serverless Framework, but I couldn't find much information about this. Is it even possible?
There is no GetObject event. Please, follow this link for a list of supported events. S3 will only notify you (or trigger a Lambda function) when an object is created, removed or lost due to reduced redundancy.
So, it's not possible to do exactly what you want, but you have a few alternatives.
Alternatives
Use Lambda#Edge to intercept your calls to a CloudFront distribution that uses a S3 as Origin. This interceptor could be able to send another file if the requested one is missing. This is not a good solution since you would increase latency and costs to your operation.
Instead of offering a S3 endpoint to your clients, offer a API Gateway endpoint. In this case, ALL image requests would be processed by a Lambda function with the possibility to give another file if the requested one is missing. This is not a good solution since you would increase latency and costs to your operation.
And the best option, that may work, but I have not tried, is to configure a S3 bucket Redirection Rule. This is a common use case for static website hosting where a page not found (status code 404) redirects to another page (like page-not-found.html). In your case, you could try to redirect to an address of a default image. This solution would not use Lambda functions.