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Protecting Personally Identifiable Information

Web Engagement allows you to protect personally identifiable information (PII) for all direct requests made to Elasticsearch by way of the HTTP interface, which is normally on port 9200. In particular, you can:

Note: This protection does not extend to access through the binary interface on port 9300, which is used both by Java clients and for communication between Cassandra nodes.

Preventing Changes to the Elasticsearch Cassandra Index

You can prevent modifications to the Elasticsearch index by using a read-only filter that prohibits REST calls (POST, PUT, DELETE) on the HTTP interface for all URLs used by Elasticsearch. However, even if you use the filter, Elasticsearch still allows you to make POST or PUT read requests containing JSON content. Here is an example:

POST http://server:9200/indexName/someType/_search  
{ JSON }

You can also make read-only requests to known resources such as /*.kibana/ and the Web Engagement Reporting Server collector configuration parameter.

The filter uses a regular expression to limit access. The default regex looks like this:

/_msearch|/_mget|/_search|/_search_shards|/_suggest|/_count|/_validate|/_explain|\.kibana|garp\.collector|tenantConfiguration|\.garp|systemConfiguration|/conversion|/webtraffic

If a request is rejected, the server will respond with 403 "Access Forbidden".

Application Options

The following options belong to the [elasticsearch] section.

Key Value Default Comment
http-read-only Boolean false Enables read-only mode
read-only-urls-regexp String See the default expression mentioned above Value must be a valid regular expression

Restricting Access to Sensitive Data

You can also filter all responses from Elasticsearch queries that return data. If one of the top level keys of the JSON source response matches the filter it will be replaced by ********. It is important to note that even a JSON object or a JSON array will be replaced by this string. The length of the string is constant.

Here is the default expression, which is case insensitive:

password

Unfiltered Response

{   
   "took":90,
   "timed_out":false,
   "_shards":{   
      "total":5,
      "successful":5,
      "failed":0
   },
   "hits":{   
      "total":1,
      "max_score":1.0,
      "hits":[   
         {   
            "_index":"cointr",
            "_type":"user",
            "_id":"1",
            "_score":1.0,
            "_source":{   
               "postDate":"2015-06-24",
               "password":"secret",
               "user":"jh"
            }
         }
      ]
   }
}

Filtered Response

{   
   "took":1,
   "timed_out":false,
   "_shards":{   
      "total":5,
      "successful":5,
      "failed":0
   },
   "hits":{   
      "total":1,
      "max_score":1.0,
      "hits":[   
         {   
            "_index":"cointr",
            "_type":"user",
            "_id":"1",
            "_score":1.0,
            "_source":{   
               "postDate":"2015-06-24",
               "password":"********",
               "user":"jh"
            }
         }
      ]
   }
}

Application Options

The following options belong to the [elasticsearch] section.

Key Value Default Comment
http-filter Boolean false Enables response filter mode
reponse-filter-regexp String password Value must be a valid regular expression and is not case sensitive

reponse-filter-regexp-type

String

REGEXP

Regular expression type:

REGEXP—standard Java regular expression

PATH—JSON path expression

This page was last edited on May 31, 2019, at 15:13.
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