Securing service parameters in Cloud Foundry environment variables

Question

Environment variables are the means by which the Cloud Foundry runtime communicates to the application about its environment. One of the most important pieces of information it communicates are the services which are available and how to connect with them.

Source

The same page gives a sample of environment variables containing connection parameters like user-name password for MySQL database.

VCAP_SERVICES: {
"mongodb-1.8":[{"name":"hello-mongo","label":"mongodb-1.8","plan":"free","credentials":{"hostname":"172.30.48.64","port":25003,"username":"e4f2c402-1153-4dfb-8d98-2f6efc65e441","password":"f17f81e4-9855-4b9c-a22b-e6a9e6f113c3","name":"mongodb-5751dac0-3b5e-405b-a1e1-2b384fe4026d","db":"db"}}],
"redis-2.2":[{"name":"hello-redis","label":"redis-2.2","plan":"free","credentials":{"node_id":"redis_node_4","hostname":"172.30.48.43","port":5002,"password":"e1d7acb0-2baf-42be-84bc-3365aa819586","name":"redis-96836b7c-0949-45fd-a741-c7be5951d52f"}}],
"mysql-5.1":[{"name":"hello-mysql","label":"mysql-5.1","plan":"free","credentials":{"node_id":"mysql_node_5","hostname":"172.30.48.24","port":3306,"password":"pw4EKJqL6na6f","name":"dd9b58515e3cb41958a30bf2af88126fc","user":"uLfJbOmxfSEUt"}}]

}

The page further states:

You can read this information into your application using Java's environment variable API and/or existing Spring XML features but it is easer to consume this information using the new cloud namespace (described here) which parses it out into a convenient Properties object.

Reading this I wondered what implications this setup have for application security. Specifically what measures should the developer take to keep malicious attackers from gaining direct control of backend services like mysql database?

EDIT: Apart from the risk of attacker gaining control of backend service, I also can imagine the risk of attacker causing the application to connect to a malicious backend.

Martin Martin · Accepted Answer · 2011-11-21T22:21:25

If you want to connect to a backend (database) service, you must provide the application with credentials somehow. To be able to dynamically bind to services, environment variables are a good choice to pass application private information to to the application.

As with any application compromise, the backend gets exposed when the application is hacked.

The only way you can connect to a malicious backend is if the attacker can setup a malicious service on the Cloud Foundry infrastructure and is able to compromise the Cloud Controller to pass the application forged environment variables.

Securing service parameters in Cloud Foundry environment variables

1 Answers