With a bold title like that I suppose I should clarify a bit. I finally got frustrated enough with all the disparate and seemingly incomplete information on this topic to want to gather everything I know about this topic into a single place, both so I have it for my own reference but also in the hopes that it will help others.
Since CouchDB is just an HTTP resource and can be secured at that level along the same lines as you’d secure any HTTP resource, I should also point out that I will not be covering things like putting a proxy in front of CouchDB, using SSL with CouchDB, or anything along those lines. This post is strictly limited to how authentication and security work within CouchDB itself.
CouchDB security is powerful and granular but frankly it’s also a bit quirky and counterintuitive. What I’m outlining here is my understanding of all of this after taking several runs at it, reading everything I could find on the Internet (yes, the whole Internet!), and a great deal of trial and error. That said if there’s something I’m missing or not stating accurately here I would LOVE to be corrected.
Basically the way security works in CouchDB is that users are stored in the _users database (or elsewhere if you like; this can be changed in the config file), and security revolves around three user roles:
- Server admin
- Database admin
- Database reader
Notice one missing? That’s right, there is not a defined database reader/writer or database writer role. We’ll get to that in a minute. And of course you can define your own roles provided that you write the functionality to make them meaningful to your databases.
Here’s how the three basic roles play out:
- Server admins can do anything across the entire server. This includes creating/deleting databases, managing users, and full admin access to all databases, i.e. full CRUD on all documents as well as the ability to create/modify/delete views, run compaction and replication, etc. In short, god mode.
- Database admins have full read/write access (including design documents) on specific databases and can also modify security settings on a specific database. (I don’t know if database admins can manage replication because I did not test that specifically.)
- Database readers can only read documents and views on a specific database, and have no other permissions.
Even given all of this, reading and writing in CouchDB needs more clarification so you know what is and isn’t allowed:
- By default all databases are read/write enabled for anonymous users, even if you define database admins on a database. Note that this includes the ability to call design documents via GET, but does not include the ability to create/edit/delete design documents. Once you turn off admin party you have to be a server or database admin in order to manage design documents.
- If you define any database readers on a database anonymous reads are disabled, but anonymous writes (of regular documents, not design documents) are still enabled.
- In order to prohibit anonymous writes, you must create a design document containing a validation function in each database to handle this (much more on this below).
- Regardless of any other settings server admins always have full access to everything, with the exception that if you create a validation function the admin user’s access is impacted by any rules in that validation function. More on this below, but basically if you create a validation function looking for a specific user or role and the admin user doesn’t match the criteria, they’ll be blocked just like anyone else.
Blocking Anonymous Writes
So now we come to the issue of blocking anonymous writes (meaning create/update/delete), and it’s simple enough but I have no idea why this isn’t done at the user level. Maybe there’s a logical reason that isn’t written down anywhere, but why you can’t create a reader/writer user or role is a mystery to me.
But enough whining. Here’s how you do it.
To block anonymous writes you have to create a design document in the database that contains what’s called a validation function. This basically means that your design document must contain a validate_doc_update field, and the ID for this document follows the standard pattern for design documents, e.g. something like _design/blockAnonymousWrites The value of the validate_doc_update field is a function that will be run before all write operations, and it takes the new document, the old document (which would be null on create operations), and the user context in as arguments. This gives you access to everything you need to do simple things like check for a valid user, or more complex things like seeing if specific fields exist in the document that’s about to be written or even if there are conflicts on an update operation with the old version of the document that you want to reject.
Here’s a sample validation function that simply checks for a specific user name, foo, and rejects the write operation if the user is not foo:
function(new_doc, old_doc, userCtx) { if(userCtx.name != 'foo') { throw({forbidden: "Not Authorized"}); } }
The userCtx object has properties of name and roles. The name property is the user name as a string, and roles is an array of role strings.
Let’s say you wanted to limit write operations to the role bar. To accomplish that you’d use JavaScript’s indexOf() method on the userCtx.roles array to see if the required role exists:
function(new_doc, old_doc, userCtx) { if(userCtx.roles.indexOf('bar') == -1) { throw({forbidden: "Not Authorized"}); } }
Obviously on top of all of this you have access to all the properties of the document being posted as well as the old document if it’s a revision, and you can use all that information to do whatever additional validation you need on the document data itself before allowing the document to be written to the database.
Creating Users
As far as creating users is concerned you can either do this in Futon or (as with everything in CouchDB) via the HTTP API. Note that if you create users via Futon you need to be aware that if you are logged in as admin and click the “Setup more admins” link you’re creating a server admin. That means they have permission to do literally everything on that CouchDB server.
If you want to create a non-admin user make sure you’re logged out and click on the “Signup” link, and you can create a user that way. Note that this doesn’t work on BigCouch if you’re hitting Futon on port 5984 since the _users database lives on port 5986 in BigCouch, and that backend port is by default only accessible via localhost; more on that below. And big thanks to Robert Newson on the CouchDB mailing list for pointing that out since I was tearing my hair out a bit after my recent migration to BigCouch.
If you want to create users via the HTTP API, in CouchDB 1.2 or higher you simply do a PUT to the _users database via curl or another HTTP tool, or make an HTTP call via your favorite scripting language. I’ll show all the examples in curl since it’s language agnostic and universally available (not to mention because I find curl so damn handy).
curl -X PUT http://mycouch:5984/_users/org.couchdb.user:bob -d '{"name":"bob", "password":"bobspassword", "roles":[], "type":"user"}' -H "Content-Type: application/json"
That will create a user document with an ID of org.couchdb.user:bob and a user name of bob, and bob is not a server admin. In CouchDB 1.2 it will see the password field in the document and automatically create a password salt and hash the password for you.
On versions of CouchDB prior to 1.2, or with servers based on versions of CouchDB prior to 1.2 such as BigCouch 0.4.0 (which is based on CouchDB 1.1.1), the auto-salt-hash bit does not happen. This means you need to salt and hash the password information and store the hashed password and the salt in the user document.
As a reminder in case you weren’t paying attention earlier: On BigCouch the _users database is on port 5986. This had me banging my head against my desk for the better part of an afternoon. It’s probably documented somewhere but you know geeks and reading manuals, so I’m sharing that important tidbit in the hopes it helps someone else.
To create a user on CouchDB < 1.2 or BigCouch 0.4.0 (which again is based on CouchDB 1.1.1) you first need to:
- Create a salt
- Hash the concatenation of the password and the salt using SHA1
- Include the salt used as the salt property of your user document, and the hashed password as the password_sha property of your user document
There are numerous ways to do all of this and you can see some examples in various languages and technologies on the CouchDB wiki, but since openssl is standard and a quick and easy way to do things I’ll recap that method here.
First you need to generate a salt: SALT=`openssl rand 16 | openssl md5`
Next echo that out just to make sure it got set properly: echo $SALT
Next you concatenate whatever password you want + the salt, and then hash the password using SHA1: echo -n "thepasswordhere$SALT" | openssl sha1
One caveat: if when you echo $SALT it contains (stdin) at the beginning like so:
(stdin)= 4e8096c4d0047e8d535df4b356b8d102
Make sure NOT to include the (stdin)= part in what you’re going to put into CouchDB. Ignore (stdin)= and the space that follows and use only the hex value.
After generating a salt and hashing the password the end result that you put in CouchDB looks something like this (you’d obviously replace thehashedpassword and thesalt with the appropriate values): curl -X PUT http://mycouch:5984/_users/org.couchdb.user:bob -d '{"name":"bob", "password_sha":"thehashedpassword", "salt":"thesalt", "roles":[], "type":"user"}' -H "Content-Type: application/json"
Of course if you know when you’re creating the user that you want to grant them a specific role, you’d put that in the roles array. These roles will be contained in userCtx.roles in validation functions and you can act on that accordingly (see the above discussion about validation functions for more details).
And again note that if you’re on BigCouch use port 5986 for the _users database!
Summary
To sum all this up, here’s a handy-dandy chart.
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And that’s more or less all I know about CouchDB security. I’ll end with some links if you want to explore further.
Any questions, corrections, or suggestions for clarification are very welcome. Hope some of you found this helpful!
Security/Validation Function Links
- http://wiki.apache.org/couchdb/Security_Features_Overview
- http://wiki.apache.org/couchdb/Security_Features_Overview#Salt_and_Password_Generator (steps for creating new non-admin users in a terminal using openssl)
- http://blog.lizconlan.com/sandbox/securing-couchdb.htm
- http://blog.couchbase.com/what%E2%80%99s-new-couchdb-10-%E2%80%94-part-4-security%E2%80%99n-stuff-users-authentication-authorisation-and-permissions
- http://spin.atomicobject.com/2011/12/22/authentication-and-couchdb/
- http://www.hbensalem.com/nosql/couchdb-validation-functions/
- http://custardbelly.com/blog/2011/03/04/jquery-mobile-couchdb-part-7-1-authorization-and-validation/
- http://guide.couchdb.org/draft/validation.html
- http://www.jasondavies.com/blog/2009/05/27/secure-cookie-authentication-couchdb/