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DB Connector Security

Owned by Former user (Deleted)
Sept 21, 2016
2 min read

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.

On this page:

 

Configure SSL

The database connector does not have any specific configuration to handle SSL. Since it runs inside the Servlet container, it is typically the responsibility of the container to handle this layer of security. In any case, here is what we have done for customers that needed SSL and were using Tomcat: 

SSL (Secure Socket Layer), is a technology which allows web clients and web servers to communicate over a secured connection. This means the data being sent is encrypted by one side, transmitted, and then decrypted by the other side before processing. This is a two-way process, meaning that both the server AND the client encrypt all traffic before sending out data.”. The basic steps:

  • Configure Tomcat to accept only SSL connections to the  Database Connector. This encrypts data sent between the hosted  Server and the Database Connector installed in your local machine, thus protecting the queryKey.
  • Create a SSL self-signed certificate and install in Tomcat’s keystore. The self-signed certificate will ensure that the data being transmitted and received by the  Database Connector is private and cannot be snooped by anyone who may be eavesdropping on the connection.
  • If you are running the  Database Connector under Tomcat you can find more details here. 

The queryKey attribute

The queryKey attribute enables a password authentication mechanism that limits query execution to only those who know the queryKey password string. Every HTTP request that is sent to the database connector to execute that query must contain the key. The connector will deny all requests that do not contain the key.
 
For example, given the configuration below:

<query name="customers" queryKey="abc123"> 
    <retrieve>
    <!-- maps to the http GET method --> 
        <statement> 
            SELECT * FROM customers WHERE customerId='{customerId}'
        </statement> 
    </retrieve>
</query>

 A valid request would be: http://localhost:8082/database/myStore/customers?queryKey=abc123&customerId=23434

SQL Injection Protection

The  Database Connector automatically protects your data from Injection Attacks. No configuration is required for this security measure.