"Read-only", monitoring agent

Ian Springer ian.springer at redhat.com
Thu Mar 1 15:36:52 UTC 2012


We support SSL cert-based authentication of Agent-to-Server and
Server-to-Agent communications [1]. Plugins are distributed from Server
to Agents via these securable communication channels, so wouldn't
setting that up be sufficient to validate Agents are not getting
untrusted plugins?

Note, PluginUpdate.updatePlugins() in the Agent is where we pull down
the latest set of plugin jars from the Server. We then only deploy
exactly that set of plugin jars. Any other plugin jars the happen to be
in the Agent plugins dir are rejected.

[1] http://rhq-project.org/display/JOPR2/Securing+Communications

On 03/01/2012 09:58 AM, Costel Cosman wrote:
> Hi,
>
> About the proposal to have a "read-only", monitoring agent (See RFC:
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=783911), I added a comment 
> with an additional idea:
>
> ===========================================================================
> It seems a good idea to have a "read-only" agent.
>
> The proposed solution (to disable the "write" features like Configuration and
> Provisioning and leave only "read" features like Monitoring) still has an
> issue: malicious code can be embedded in the monitoring part of the plugins. 
>
> An idea would be to sign the plugin JAR. The agent will check the signature
> every time a plugin update is performed. The signature will guarantee that the
> plugins come only from a trusted
>  source.
> ============================================================================
>
> What do you think about this idea ?
>
> Regards,
> Costel
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> rhq-devel at lists.fedorahosted.org
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-- 
Ian Springer
Principal Software Developer
JBoss Operations Network
Red Hat
ian.springer at redhat.com

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