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When accessing your database from an externally hosted SaaS Server, follow these steps to ensure your data is secure. You may also wish to consider one or all of these step even when using the in-house version if you feel your intranet is not secure.

Using the Database Connector's security mechanism, combined with only accepting SSL connections to the database connector from the web application container, will prevent unauthorized access to your database queries. The steps below describe how to secure your data.

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  1. Get a SSL Certificate. We recommend you get a certificate with PKCS12 (.pfx or .p12) format and SHA2 encryption.

  2. Edit <connectorInstallationDirectory<connectorInstallationDirectory>\config\dbconnector.properties to add the SSL to the keystore. Example:

    Code Block
    # Customize the DbConnector here
logging.file=./logs/database-connector.%d{yyyy-MM-dd}.log
server.port=8443
server.ssl.key-store=keystore.p12
server.ssl.key-store-password=PASSWORD
server.ssl.keyStoreType=PKCS12
server.ssl.keyAlias=tomcat


    The property "server.ssl.key-store" must point to the location of the certificate file on your server. If you save the certificate file in the same directory as the dbconnector.properties file, you can just set this to the file name.

  3. Browse https://<host>:<port>/database/status to check the status of the connector. Note: You may see a warning about an invalid cert, however you will get the status page if you 'ignore' and go past it.

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While you cannot encrypt the database password in the <frevvo-home>\tomcat\conf\dbconnector.properties file, you can provide added security using one of the following methods:

  1. Define the data source at the container (tomcat) level for some added security. Please see this documentation which explains how.
  2. Store password as an OS Environment Variable and reference that variable in the dbconnector.properties file. See Secure Passwords in Tomcat for details.


Block Public Access to Database Connector URLs

There is nothing built in the  Database Connector to block public access or enforce authentication to the database connector status page or other database connector URLs.
 
If you are using  On Premise and the Database Connector is installed in the same tomcat as frevvo, you can restrict access to all database connector URLs from outside, allowing connections only from localhost (i.e. frevvo) by creating an individual context.xml for your app.

  1. Stop frevvo.
  2. Navigate to <frevvohome>\tomcat\webapps\database\META-INF\context.xml. Edit this file.

  3. Add the line 

    Code Block
    <Valve className="org.apache.catalina.valves.RemoteAddrValve" allow="127\.\d+\.\d+\.\d+|::1|0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1"/>

    Your context.xml should now look like this:

    Code Block
    <Context path="/database" unpackWAR="true" copyXML="false">
	<Parameter name="spring.main.banner-mode" value="OFF" override="false"/>
	<Parameter name="logging.file" value="${catalina.base}/logs/database-connector.%d{yyyy-MM-dd}.log" override="false"/>
	
	<JarScanner scanClassPath="false"/>
	<!-- Add the next line to block remote access to the "database" web app -->
	<Valve className="org.apache.catalina.valves.RemoteAddrValve" allow="127\.\d+\.\d+\.\d+|::1|0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1"/>
</Context>
    Info

    Please see additional options for this solution in this article.

  4. Restart frevvo.

Alternately, if you want to block public access to just the Database Connector status page, then the only option is to block it using a reverse proxy.