Skip to main content

PSMDB - A MongoDB alternative for having Encryption At Rest


Encryption is the most popular tool for securing data both in transit and at rest.

- For protecting data in transit, we can configure to use the TLS connection

- For protecting data at rest, we can use Percona Server for MongoDB (PSMDB), an open-source alternative for MongoDB Enterprise.


License

PSMDB Docker images follow the SSPL license. Therefore, it is not a problem when I only have my containers deployed in on-premises environments.

Running MongoDB Replication on OpenShift

I have successfully installed the replication by following the guide Install Percona Server for MongoDB on OpenShift. In order to make it work properly with my needs, I disabled some features from the default deployment. See the detail in this change

Basically, I needed to create a CRD (Custom Resource Definition) to let OpenShift/Kubernetes what PSMDB is. Then, I deployed the Operator pod. Finally, I deployed the PSMDB StatefulSet. I used NFS shares for Persistent Volumes.

Create CRD for PSMDB

2git clone https://github.com/percona/percona-server-mongodb-operator 3cd percona-server-mongodb-operator 4 5# create Custom Resource Definition (CRD) with cluster-admin role 6# This task is needed to executed once 7oc apply -f deploy/crd.yaml

Deploy the Operator pod

2oc new-project psmdb 3 4# Add role-based access control (RBAC) 5oc apply -f deploy/rbac.yaml 6 7# deploy operator pod 8oc apply -f deploy/operator.yaml 9 10# Add secret 11oc create -f deploy/secrets.yaml

Create SealedSecret for local keyfile

(Assumed that SealedSecret is installed and ready for use)

By default, the operator generates a normal Kubernetes secret with the name "my-cluster-name-mongodb-encryption-key". This secret is automatically attached to the MongoDB StatefulSet and persisted as a file through volumes. The operator also handles passing the files to "mongod" command in the container entry point. We can replace the secret in the deployment templates "deploy/cr.yaml". For example:

1 security 2 enableEncryption: true 3 encryptionKeySecret: mongodb-encryption-key 4 encryptionCipherMode: AES256-CBC

Here is an example to create a SealedSecret "mongodb-encryption-key" locally and apply it to the project.
1 $ openssl rand -base64 32 > mongodb-keyfile 2$ cat mongodb-keyfile | kubectl create secret generic mongodb-encryption-key \ 3--dry-run=client --from-file=encryption-key=/dev/stdin \ 4-o yaml > mongodb-encryption-secret.yaml 5$ kubeseal < mongodb-encryption-secret.yaml > mongodb-encryption-sealed-secret.yaml 6$ oc create -f mongodb-encryption-sealed-secret.yaml

Install PSMDB StatefulSet

(Assumed that NFS is installed and ready for use)

Create NFS shares: data-0, data-1, and data-2. Here is a sample command for data-0
1$> ssh someuser@files.example.com.local 2$> sudo mkdir /srv/data/psmdb/mongodb/data-0 3$> sudo chown nfsnobody:0 /srv/data/psmdb/mongodb/data-0 4$> sudo chmod go+w /srv/data/psmdb/mongodb/data-0 5$> sudo chmod g+s /srv/data/psmdb/mongodb/data-0

The directory attributes should look like

drwxrwsrwx. 5 nfsnobody root 4096 Jun 24 03:31 data-0

drwxrwsrwx. 5 nfsnobody root 4096 Jun 24 03:30 data-1

drwxrwsrwx. 5 nfsnobody root 4096 Jun 24 03:31 data-2

Create corresponding Persistent Volumes with NFS shares
1kind: PersistentVolume 2apiVersion: v1 3metadata: 4 name: psmdb-mongodb-data-0 5spec: 6 capacity: 7 storage: 2Gi 8 nfs: 9 server: files.example.com.local 10 path: /srv/data/psmdb/mongodb/data-0 11 accessModes: 12 - ReadWriteOnce 13 persistentVolumeReclaimPolicy: Recycle 14 storageClassName: psmdb 15

Install the PSMDB StatefulSet
1 $> oc apply -f deploy/cr.yaml
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Coding Exercise, Episode 1

I have received the following exercise from an interviewer, he didn't give the name of the problem. Honestly, I have no idea how to solve this problem even I have tried to read it three times before. Since I used to be a person who always tells myself "I am not the one good at algorithms", but giving up something too soon which I feel that I didn't spend enough effort to overcome is not my way. Then, I have sticked on it for 24 hours. According to the given image on the problem, I tried to get more clues by searching. Thanks to Google, I found a similar problem on Hackerrank (attached link below). My target here was trying my best to just understand the problem and was trying to solve it accordingly by the Editorial on Hackerrank. Due to this circumstance, it turns me to love solving algorithms from now on (laugh). Check it out! Problem You are given a very organized square of size N (1-based index) and a list of S commands The i th command will follow t...
2 comments
Read more

Junit - Test fails on French or German string assertion

In my previous post about building a regex to check a text without special characters but allow German and French . I met a problem that the unit test works fine on my machine using Eclipse, but it was fail when running on Jenkins' build job. Here is my test: @Test public void shouldAllowFrenchAndGermanCharacters(){ String source = "ÄäÖöÜüß áÁàÀâÂéÉèÈêÊîÎçÇ"; assertFalse(SpecialCharactersUtils.isExistSpecialCharater(source)); } Production code: public static boolean isExistNotAllowedCharacters(String source){ Pattern regex = Pattern.compile("^[a-zA-Z_0-9_ÄäÖöÜüß áÁàÀâÂéÉèÈêÊîÎçÇ]*$"); Matcher matcher = regex.matcher(source); return !matcher.matches(); } The result likes the following: Failed tests: SpecialCharactersUtilsTest.shouldAllowFrenchAndGermanCharacters:32 null A guy from stackoverflow.com says: "This is probably due to the default encoding used for your Java source files. The ö in the string literal in the J...
5 comments
Read more

Strategy Design Pattern

For example, I have a program with an Animal abstract class and two sub-classes Dog and Bird. I want to add new behavior for the class Animal, this is "fly".  Now, I face two approaches to solve this issue: 1. Adding an abstract method "fly" into the class Animal. Then, I force the sub-classes should be implemented this method, something like: public abstract class Animal{ //bla bla public abstract void fly(); } public class Bird extends Animal{ //bla bla public void fly(){ System.out.println("Fly high"); } } public class Dog extends Animal{ //bla bla public void fly(){ System.out.println("Cant fly"); } } 2. Creating an interface with method "fly" inside. The same issue to an abstract class, I force the classes these implement this interface should have a method "fly" inside: public interface Flyable{ public void fly(); } public class Bird implements Flyable{ //bla bla public void fly(){ System.out.pr...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to convert time between timezone in Java, Primefaces?

I use the calendar Primefaces component with timeOnly and timeZone attributes for using only hour format (HH:mm). Like this: <p:calendar id="xabsOvertimeTimeFrom" pattern="HH:mm" timeOnly="true" value="#{data.dateFrom}" timeZone="#{data.timeZone}"/> We can convert the value of #{data.dateFrom} from GMT/UTC time zone to local, conversely, from local time zone to GMT/UTC time zone. Here is my functions: package vn.nvanhuong.timezoneconverter; import java.text.ParseException; import java.text.SimpleDateFormat; import java.util.Calendar; import java.util.Date; import java.util.TimeZone; public class TimeZoneConverter { /** * convert a date with hour format (HH:mm) from local time zone to UTC time zone */ public static Date convertHourToUTCTimeZone(Date inputDate) throws ParseException { if(inputDate == null){ return null; } Calendar calendar = Calendar.getInstance(); calendar.setTime(inputDate); int ...
Post a Comment
Read more

What the heck is Meteor DDP?

I was using Meteor for my messenger project. I was so curious about the real time connection. I wanted to know how exactly this mechanism works. In this post, I will go through the DDP Specification, an overview of WebSocket, and a simple demo about how to subscribe a publication of Rocket.Chat (containing a DDP server) from an external webpage. At a glance, I knew that Meteor invented a protocol called DDP which uses for handling real time connection. So then, what is DDP? "DDP (Distributed Data Protocol) is the stateful WebSocket protocol that Meteor uses to communicate between the client and the server." [1] All right! Why does DDP matter? "DDP is a standard way to solve the biggest problem facing client-side JavaScript developers: querying a server-side database, sending the results down to the client, and then pushing changes to the client whenever anything changes in the database" . [2] In order to understand deeply the protocol, I decided ...
Post a Comment
Read more