mozilla

Security

Circus is built on the top of the ZeroMQ library and comes with no security at all in its protocols. However, you can run a Circus system on a server and set up an SSH tunnel to access it from another machine.

This section explains what Circus does on your system when you run it, and ends up describing how to use an SSH tunnel.

You can also read http://www.zeromq.org/area:faq#toc5

TCP ports

By default, Circus opens the following TCP ports on the local host:

  • 5555 – the port used to control circus via circusctl
  • 5556 – the port used for the Publisher/Subscriber channel.
  • 5557 – the port used for the statitics channel – if activated.
  • 8080 – the port used by the Web UI – if activated.

These ports allow client apps to interact with your Circus system, and depending on how your infrastructure is organized, you may want to protect these ports via firewalls or configure Circus to run using IPC ports.

Here’s an example of running Circus using only IPC entry points:

[circus]
check_delay = 5
endpoint = ipc:///var/circus/endpoint
pubsub_endpoint = ipc:///var/circus/pubsub
stats_endpoint = ipc:///var/circus/stats

When Configured using IPC, the commands must be run from the same box, but no one can access them from outside, unlike using TCP.

Of course, if you activate the Web UI, the 8080 port will still be open.

circushttpd

When you run circushttpd manually, or when you use the httpd option in the ini file like this:

[circus]
check_delay = 5
endpoint = ipc:///var/circus/endpoint
pubsub_endpoint = ipc:///var/circus/pubsub
stats_endpoint = ipc:///var/circus/stats
httpd = 1

The web application will run on port 8080 and will let anyone accessing the web page manage the circusd daemon.

That includes creating new watchers that can run any command on your system !

Do not make it publicly available

If you want to protect the access to the web panel, you can serve it behind Nginx or Apache or any proxy-capable web server, than can take care of the security.

User and Group Permissions

By default, all processes started with Circus will be running with the same user and group than circusd. Depending on the privileges the user has on the system, you may not have access to all the features Circus provides.

For instance, some statistics features on a running processes require extended privileges. Typically, if the CPU usage numbers you get using the stats command are N/A, it means your user can’t access the proc files. This will be the case by default under Mac OS X.

You may run circusd as root to fix this, and set the uid and gid values for each watcher to get all the features.

But beware that running circusd as root exposes you to potential privilege escalation bugs. While we’re doing our best to avoid any bugs, running as root and facing a bug that performs unwanted actions on your system may dangerous.

The best way to prevent this is to make sure that the system running Circus is completely isolated (like a VM) or to run the whole system under a controlled user.

SSH tunneling

Clients can connect to a circusd instance by creating an SSH tunnel. To do so, pass the command line option –ssh followed by user@address, where user is the user on the remote server and address is the server’s address as seen by the client. The SSH protocol will require credentials to complete the login.

If circusd as seen by the SSH server is not at the default endpoint address localhost:5555 then specify the circusd address using the option –endpoint

Secured setup example

Setting up a secured Circus server can be done by:

  • Running an SSH Server
  • Running Apache or Nginx on the 80 port, and doing a reverse-proxy on the 8080 port.
  • Blocking the 8080 port from outside access.
  • Running all ZMQ Circusd ports using IPC files instead of TCP ports, and tunneling all calls via SSH.
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