📦 Server Security

#Restrict access

Important remark: The appmonitor has no user login. Protect it by configuration of your webserver, i.e. use ip restriction and/ or basic authentication.

#User access to server

#General access to the web interface

Here is a snippet that forces a user login with basic auth - or access from a given ip address without any password.

  <Location "/appmonitor/server">
    Require valid-user
    AuthType Basic
    # ...
    <RequireAny>
      Require valid-user
      Require ip 192.168.10.22
    </RequireAny>

  </Location>

  <Location "/appmonitor/api">
    Require all denied
  </Location>

Remove <RequireAny> and </RequireAny> to combine it and allow password based access from the given ip address and from nowhere else.

#Appmonitor user configuration

Let’s have a look to the configuration file. The Appmonitor tries to fetch an authenticated user from PHP_AUTH_USER. You can add other fields from the server scope $_SERVER in the userfields section:

    ...
    "userfields": [
        "PHP_AUTH_USER"
    ],
    ...

A user could match two catchall fields:

• * (asterisk) matches all anonoymous users.

  • giving all roles is for your development environment.
  • If you enable authentication on /server subdirectory in the webserver then this setion is unreachable

• __default_authenticated_user__ matches any authenticated user.

  • set the default roles here.

Add a section for each known [username] to define its roles on account level.

    "users": {
        "*": {
            "password": false,
            "username": "anonymous",
            "comment": "anonymous access",
            "roles": [ "api", "ui", "ui-config", "ui-debug" ]
        },
        "__default_authenticated_user__": {
            "comment": "default roles for an by the webserver authenticated user",
            "roles": [ "api", "ui" ]
        },
        "axel": {
            "password": false,
            "username": "Axel",
            "comment": "Sysadmin",
            "roles": [
                "*"
            ]
        },

    },
    ...

#Sensitive data

These files may contain sensitive data and could be interesting for hackers. Deny the web access for

• [approot]/server/config/
• [approot]/server/tmp/

In both directories is a .htaccess - if you set AllowOverride Limit these .htaccess will be used. Otherwise create a directory or Location section to deny the web access.

  <Location "/appmonitor/server/config">
    Require all denied
  </Location>

  <Location "/appmonitor/server/tmp">
    Require all denied
  </Location>

#api access

#Limit by webserver configuration

The api access should be limited to the systems that need access to it.

  <Location "/appmonitor/api">
    ...
    Require ip 192.168.10.22
    ...
  </Location>

If request doesn’t come from an allowed ip the response is a 401 with html content for your 40x message.

#Limit by app ip address

You can limit the ip address in the configuration:

    ...
    "api":{
        "sourceips":[
            "^127\\.0\\.0\\.1$"
        ],
    ...

If request doesn’t come from an allowed ip the response is a 401 with this body

{ "http": 401, "error": "ERROR: IP 127.0.0.1 is not allowed.", "_header": "HTTP\/1.1 401 Not autorized" }

#Define an api user

On server side you must define one or more users with the role “api”. You can use

• anonymous access or
• basic authentication or
• hmac hash key

#Allow anonymous access

This is maybe for a dev environment only. Or you can restrict the ip access to single ip addresses.

For user * define as settings:

• passworrd: false
• rules: add “api”

"*": {
    "password": false,
    "roles": [
        "api"
    ]
}

#Basic authentication

Create a password hash eg on terminal:

php -r "echo password_hash('<your_password>', PASSWORD_DEFAULT);"
$2y$10$4r8V2Ys2euGyJvLALGjsWuZ8BRD7eSEBPOe36UYZApm4cEBpm6BVS

This hash must be set as password.

"api-basic": {
    "passwordhash": "$2y$10$4r8V2Ys2euGyJvLALGjsWuZ8BRD7eSEBPOe36UYZApm4cEBpm6BVS⏎",
    "roles": [
        "api"
    ]
}

OR

If you rollout servers with Ansible, Chef, Puppet, … you maybe cannot create such a hash. It is possible to configure the password as clear text too:

"api-basic": {
    "password": "<your_password>",
    "roles": [
        "api"
    ]
}

Shell:

In curl you can use the parameter -u: curl -u "api-basic:<your_password>" <url>

JS Snippet:

var apiuser = "";
var apipassword = "";

var oHeader = { "headers": {
   "Authorization": "Basic " + btoa(apiuser + ":" + apipassword)
   }
};

let response = await fetch(url, oHeader);

#HMAC hash key

To use hmac hash key you need to define a shared secret for a user.

"api-hamac": {
    "secret": "Here-is-my-most-secret-secret.",
    "roles": [
        "api"
    ]
}

The client must sent an Authentication header with your configured username and base64 encoded hash

Authorization: HMAC-SHA1 <user>:<HASH>

eg.

Authorization: HMAC-SHA1 api-hamac:HMAC-SHA1 api-test:MjUyZWZjMmMzMTU5ZjNjYWViMDY1OTEzMTY4NzAzZDRiNGY3YjQ5Mw==

The hash is generated with

• Method: “GET”
• Request: eg “/api/v1/apps/tags/monitoring/meta”
• Date: eg “Thu, 14 Nov 2024 16:10:06.663974972 CET”

All values must be concatinated with \n - but no final \n. It will be hashed with a hmac function using SHA 1 and the shared secret. Finally the string must be base64 encoded.

Sounds complicated? But you don’t need to code it yourself. You can find API clients in PHP and bash using curl here: https://github.com/iml-it/appmonitor-api-client/. With them all given authentication methods above will work.