[chef] Re: Chef and information security between nodes

[Noah Kantrowitz < >]

On Apr 23, 2012, at 1:51 PM, 
<
 >
 wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> We have evaluated Puppet and Chef during one and a half month and have 
> "almost"
> decided to go with Chef !
> 
> "Almost" because we have got a "no-go" from the responsable of the
> infrastructure due to the lack of security on node informations :(
> 
> I explain:
> We will have different VMs for different customers connected to the same 
> Chef
> Server.
> 
> When a node is connected to the Chef Server, with a properly knife 
> configured
> on it, it is possible to retrieve the list of all nodes from the Chef 
> Server,
> show the attributes of the different nodes, search the attributes among all 
> the
> nodes, and so on...
> 
> This is a big issue for us since we must prevent a customer to see any
> information about other customer. And I guess we are not the only ones who 
> met
> this issue...
> 
> We consider as a security threat that, from a node, it is possible to show
> information on other nodes.
> 
> We have looked for solution, and the only one we have found so far is to 
> modify
> the source code of the Chef Server API in order to add restriction such "a 
> node
> is able to see only its own information".
> 
> Before we start to look more deeply in this solution, could you please let 
> us
> know if you see any other solution to our problem please ?
> 
> Thanks in advance for your feedback.

You can use the ACLs system in Hosted Chef to lock down this kind of access 
to a degree. The search index will still be a problem. Chef server isn't 
designed for multi-tennancy at the level of the organization (or at the level 
of the server for FOSS users), to get true isolation you need to create one 
org (or server) per tenant.

--Noah

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