Description: An attacker gains unauthorized access to the GoAccess HTML report, which is exposed without proper authentication or authorization. The attacker browses the report, viewing sensitive information logged by the web server, such as PII, session tokens, internal IP addresses, or API keys that were inadvertently included in URLs or headers.
Impact: Data breach, privacy violation, potential for identity theft, and further targeted attacks against the application or its users.
Affected Component: GoAccess HTML report output (the generated report.html file and the directory it resides in). The WebSocket server (if enabled and exposed) is also a potential attack vector.
Risk Severity: Critical
Mitigation Strategies:
* Implement Strong Authentication: Protect the GoAccess output directory with robust authentication (e.g., HTTP Basic Auth, a dedicated login page, or integration with an existing authentication system).
* Restrict Network Access: Use firewall rules or network segmentation to limit access to the GoAccess output directory to authorized users and systems only. Do not expose it directly to the public internet.
* Secure WebSocket Configuration: If using the real-time WebSocket feature, ensure it is configured with strong authentication and TLS encryption.
* Regularly Review Access Logs: Monitor access logs for the GoAccess output directory to detect any unauthorized access attempts.
Description: An attacker floods the web server with requests, generating a massive volume of log entries. If GoAccess is configured for real-time analysis, this can overwhelm the GoAccess process, causing it to consume excessive CPU and memory, leading to a denial-of-service condition for GoAccess itself and potentially impacting the web server.
Impact: Unavailability of GoAccess reports, potential performance degradation of the web server.
Affected Component: GoAccess real-time processing engine (specifically, the parsing and analysis logic when using options like -f with a constantly updating log file or --real-time-html).
Risk Severity: High
Mitigation Strategies:
* Rate Limiting (Web Server): Implement rate limiting at the web server level to prevent attackers from generating excessive requests.
* Resource Limits (GoAccess): Configure resource limits (CPU, memory) for the GoAccess process using system tools (e.g., ulimit on Linux).
* Avoid Real-time on Production: Avoid using real-time GoAccess analysis on production servers with high traffic loads. Process logs offline or on a separate server.
* Incremental Processing: Utilize GoAccess's incremental processing features (--load-from-disk) to avoid re-processing the entire log file on each update.
* Log Rotation: Implement frequent log rotation.
Description: If GoAccess reports are stored in a predictable location (e.g., /goaccess/report.html) without additional access controls, an attacker can guess the URL and access the report, even if they don't have direct access to the server.
Impact: Unauthorized access to GoAccess reports, leading to data exposure.
Affected Component: GoAccess HTML report output (the generated report.html file and its location).
Risk Severity: High
Mitigation Strategies:
* Randomized Report Filenames: Configure GoAccess to generate reports with randomized filenames or store them in a non-predictable directory.
* Access Control (Web Server): Configure the web server to restrict access to the GoAccess output directory, requiring authentication.
* Obfuscation: While not a primary defense, consider using a less obvious directory name than /goaccess.