mitigations.md

Mitigation Strategies Analysis for olivere/elastic

Mitigation Strategy: Enable TLS/HTTPS for Elasticsearch Communication in olivere/elastic Client

• Description:
  1. Configure Client URL: When creating the elastic.Client in your Go application, ensure the Elasticsearch URL(s) provided to elastic.NewClient or elastic.SetURL start with https:// instead of http://. For example: elastic.NewClient(elastic.SetURL("https://your-elasticsearch-host:9200")).
  2. Verify Configuration: Double-check your client initialization code to confirm the https:// protocol is used. Review configuration files or environment variables if URLs are sourced from there.
  3. Handle TLS Certificates (if needed): If your Elasticsearch cluster uses self-signed certificates or certificates signed by an internal CA, you might need to configure a custom http.Client and provide it to elastic.SetHttpClient. This custom client should be configured to trust your CA certificate or skip TLS verification (for development/testing only, never in production). For production, ensure proper CA certificate configuration. Example for skipping verification (development only, insecure):

     import "net/http"
     import "crypto/tls"
     
     tr := &http.Transport{
         TLSClientConfig: &tls.Config{InsecureSkipVerify: true},
     }
     httpClient := &http.Client{Transport: tr}
     client, err := elastic.NewClient(elastic.SetURL("https://your-elasticsearch-host:9200"), elastic.SetHttpClient(httpClient))

  4. Test Connection: Verify the connection by running a simple Elasticsearch query from your application and observing network traffic (e.g., using browser developer tools or network monitoring tools) to confirm HTTPS is used.
• Threats Mitigated:
  • Eavesdropping (High Severity) - Prevents attackers from intercepting and reading data transmitted between your application and Elasticsearch via olivere/elastic.
  • Man-in-the-Middle Attacks (High Severity) - Protects against attackers intercepting and manipulating communication between your application and Elasticsearch when using olivere/elastic.
  • Credential Sniffing (Medium Severity) - Reduces the risk of credentials being intercepted during transmission by olivere/elastic if not already using secure credential management.
• Impact:
  • Eavesdropping: High Risk Reduction
  • Man-in-the-Middle Attacks: High Risk Reduction
  • Credential Sniffing: Medium Risk Reduction
• Currently Implemented: HTTPS is generally enforced in production and staging configurations for olivere/elastic clients.
• Missing Implementation: Enforcement is not always consistently verified across all application components using olivere/elastic. Automated checks in CI/CD are not yet implemented to specifically validate HTTPS enforcement for olivere/elastic clients. Local development setups might sometimes inadvertently use HTTP.

Mitigation Strategy: Keep olivere/elastic Library Up-to-Date

• Description:
  1. Monitor for Updates: Regularly check for new releases of the olivere/elastic library on GitHub or through your Go dependency management tool (e.g., go list -u -m all). Subscribe to release notifications if available.
  2. Review Release Notes: When updates are available, carefully review the release notes to understand changes, bug fixes, and especially security-related fixes.
  3. Update Dependency: Use your Go dependency management tool (e.g., go get -u github.com/olivere/elastic/v7 or update your go.mod file and run go mod tidy) to update the olivere/elastic library to the latest stable version.
  4. Test After Update: After updating, thoroughly test your application to ensure compatibility with the new version of olivere/elastic and verify that all Elasticsearch interactions still function as expected. Pay attention to any deprecated features or API changes mentioned in the release notes.
• Threats Mitigated:
  • Exploitation of Known Vulnerabilities in olivere/elastic (High Severity) - Reduces the risk of attackers exploiting publicly known vulnerabilities that might be discovered in the olivere/elastic library itself.
  • Dependency Vulnerabilities (High Severity) - Addresses potential vulnerabilities in the library's dependencies that are fixed in newer releases.
• Impact:
  • Exploitation of Known Vulnerabilities in olivere/elastic: High Risk Reduction
  • Dependency Vulnerabilities: High Risk Reduction
• Currently Implemented: olivere/elastic library updates are included in application release cycles, typically every sprint, but are not always prioritized solely for security updates.
• Missing Implementation: Automated dependency scanning and alerts for known vulnerabilities in olivere/elastic are not fully integrated into the CI/CD pipeline. Proactive monitoring for new releases and security advisories could be improved.

Mitigation Strategy: Securely Manage Elasticsearch Credentials for olivere/elastic Client

• Description:
  1. Avoid Hardcoding in Code: Never hardcode Elasticsearch usernames, passwords, or API keys directly in your Go application code where you initialize the elastic.Client.
  2. Use Environment Variables: Store credentials as environment variables (e.g., ELASTIC_USERNAME, ELASTIC_PASSWORD, ELASTIC_API_KEY). Access these variables using os.Getenv in your Go code and use them with elastic.SetBasicAuth or elastic.SetAPIKey when creating the elastic.Client. Example:

     username := os.Getenv("ELASTIC_USERNAME")
     password := os.Getenv("ELASTIC_PASSWORD")
     client, err := elastic.NewClient(elastic.SetURL("https://your-elasticsearch-host:9200"), elastic.SetBasicAuth(username, password))

  3. Utilize Secrets Management Solutions: For enhanced security, use dedicated secrets management solutions (e.g., HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault, Google Secret Manager). Retrieve credentials programmatically from these services within your application and use them to configure the elastic.Client.
  4. Least Privilege Credentials: Ensure the credentials used by your olivere/elastic client have only the minimum necessary permissions in Elasticsearch, as defined by RBAC roles.
  5. Secrets Rotation: Implement a process for regularly rotating Elasticsearch passwords and API keys used by your application. Update the secrets in your secrets management system and ensure your application picks up the new credentials.
• Threats Mitigated:
  • Credential Exposure (High Severity) - Prevents accidental or intentional exposure of Elasticsearch credentials in application code, configuration files within the codebase, or version control.
  • Unauthorized Access (High Severity) - Reduces the risk of unauthorized access to Elasticsearch if credentials are compromised from application code or configuration.
  • Lateral Movement (Medium Severity) - Limits the impact of compromised application credentials by adhering to least privilege principles for the client's Elasticsearch user.
• Impact:
  • Credential Exposure: High Risk Reduction
  • Unauthorized Access: High Risk Reduction
  • Lateral Movement: Medium Risk Reduction
• Currently Implemented: Production and staging environments use environment variables and AWS Secrets Manager for managing Elasticsearch credentials used by olivere/elastic clients.
• Missing Implementation: Local development environments sometimes still rely on less secure methods like configuration files for convenience. Secrets rotation for application credentials is manual and not fully automated.

Mitigation Strategy: Validate and Sanitize User Inputs When Building Queries with olivere/elastic

• Description:
  1. Input Validation Before Query Construction: Before using user inputs to construct Elasticsearch queries with olivere/elastic's query builders, validate these inputs against expected formats, data types, and allowed values. Reject invalid inputs early in the process.
  2. Use olivere/elastic Query Builders: Primarily rely on the query builder functions provided by olivere/elastic (e.g., elastic.NewTermQuery, elastic.NewMatchQuery, elastic.NewBoolQuery, etc.) to construct queries. These builders help parameterize queries and avoid direct string concatenation of user inputs into query strings, reducing injection risks.
  3. Avoid String Interpolation/Concatenation: Minimize or completely avoid directly embedding user inputs into query strings using string interpolation or concatenation when using olivere/elastic. Prefer using the library's query builder methods.
  4. Sanitize Inputs (If Necessary): If you must include user inputs in parts of the query that are not handled by query builders (which should be rare), carefully sanitize or escape user inputs to remove or neutralize potentially harmful characters or code that could be interpreted as part of an Elasticsearch query structure. However, relying on query builders is the preferred approach.
  5. Limit User-Controlled Query Parameters: Restrict the types and range of user-controlled parameters that can influence Elasticsearch queries built with olivere/elastic. Avoid allowing users to directly control complex query structures or fields.
• Threats Mitigated:
  • Elasticsearch Injection (Medium Severity) - Prevents attackers from injecting malicious code or queries into Elasticsearch through user inputs processed by olivere/elastic, potentially leading to data breaches, data manipulation, or denial of service.
  • Denial of Service (DoS) (Medium Severity) - Prevents attackers from crafting malicious queries via user inputs that could overload or crash the Elasticsearch cluster when processed by olivere/elastic.
• Impact:
  • Elasticsearch Injection: Medium Risk Reduction
  • Denial of Service (DoS): Medium Risk Reduction
• Currently Implemented: Input validation is implemented for most user-facing search functionalities that use olivere/elastic. Query builders are used throughout the application for constructing queries.
• Missing Implementation: Sanitization and escaping are not consistently applied as a secondary measure in all input points influencing olivere/elastic queries. More comprehensive security testing is needed to identify potential injection vulnerabilities even when using query builders.

Mitigation Strategy: Implement Proper Error Handling for olivere/elastic Operations

• Description:
  1. Check Errors After olivere/elastic Operations: After every interaction with Elasticsearch using olivere/elastic (e.g., client.Index().Do(ctx), client.Search().Do(ctx)), always check for errors returned by the Do(ctx) method.
  2. Log Detailed Errors (Securely): If an error occurs, log the detailed error information returned by olivere/elastic, including the error message and any relevant context. Log these errors to secure logs that are not accessible to unauthorized users. This helps in debugging and security monitoring.
  3. Generic Error Messages for Users: When presenting errors to users, return generic error messages that do not expose sensitive information or internal system details. Avoid displaying raw error messages from olivere/elastic directly to users.
  4. Alerting on Specific olivere/elastic Errors: Set up alerts for specific error conditions returned by olivere/elastic that might indicate security issues or operational problems, such as authentication failures, authorization errors, connection errors, or query execution failures.
• Threats Mitigated:
  • Information Disclosure (Low Severity) - Prevents accidental disclosure of sensitive information through overly verbose error messages from olivere/elastic displayed to users.
  • Security Monitoring Gaps (Medium Severity) - Improves security monitoring by providing detailed logs of errors from olivere/elastic for incident investigation and threat detection.
  • Debugging Challenges (Low Severity) - While focused on security, proper error handling also aids in debugging application issues related to olivere/elastic interactions.
• Impact:
  • Information Disclosure: Low Risk Reduction
  • Security Monitoring Gaps: Medium Risk Reduction
  • Debugging Challenges: Low Risk Reduction (Positive Impact)
• Currently Implemented: Generic error messages are displayed to users for olivere/elastic related errors. Detailed errors are logged to a centralized logging system.
• Missing Implementation: Alerting on security-specific olivere/elastic errors is not fully implemented. Log review processes for olivere/elastic errors could be improved with automated analysis and anomaly detection.

Mitigation Strategy: Enforce HTTPS Connections in olivere/elastic Client Configuration

• Description: (This is a repetition of the first point, but kept for completeness if the user wants a distinct entry)
  1. Verify Client Configuration: Double-check the elastic.Client configuration in your Go application to ensure that the Elasticsearch URLs are specified using the https:// protocol.
  2. Explicitly Set Transport Protocol: If you are constructing the client configuration programmatically, explicitly set the transport protocol to HTTPS.
  3. Code Review for HTTPS Enforcement: Conduct code reviews to ensure that all instances of elastic.Client creation and Elasticsearch URL configuration consistently use HTTPS.
  4. Automated Checks (Optional): Implement automated checks in your CI/CD pipeline to verify that the olivere/elastic client configuration enforces HTTPS connections.
  5. Documentation and Training: Document the requirement to use HTTPS for Elasticsearch connections and train developers on secure configuration practices for olivere/elastic.
• Threats Mitigated:
  • Accidental Plaintext Communication (High Severity) - Prevents accidental configuration errors in olivere/elastic client setup that could lead to sensitive data being transmitted in plaintext.
  • Eavesdropping (High Severity) - Ensures that communication with Elasticsearch via olivere/elastic is always encrypted, protecting against eavesdropping.
  • Man-in-the-Middle Attacks (High Severity) - Reinforces protection against man-in-the-middle attacks by consistently using HTTPS for olivere/elastic connections.
• Impact:
  • Accidental Plaintext Communication: High Risk Reduction
  • Eavesdropping: High Risk Reduction
  • Man-in-the-Middle Attacks: High Risk Reduction
• Currently Implemented: HTTPS is generally enforced in production and staging configurations for olivere/elastic clients.
• Missing Implementation: Enforcement is not always consistently verified across all application components using olivere/elastic. Automated checks in CI/CD are not yet implemented to specifically validate HTTPS enforcement for olivere/elastic clients.

Mitigation Strategy: Limit Query Complexity and Size When Using olivere/elastic

• Description:
  1. Set Size() Parameter: When building search queries with olivere/elastic's SearchService, use the Size(int) method to explicitly limit the maximum number of results returned. Avoid using very large or unlimited sizes, especially for user-facing queries.
  2. Simplify Query Structures: When constructing queries with olivere/elastic's query builders, aim for simpler query structures. Avoid deeply nested boolean queries, overly complex aggregations, or resource-intensive script queries if possible.
  3. Implement Timeouts: Set timeouts for Elasticsearch requests made through olivere/elastic to prevent long-running queries from consuming resources indefinitely. Use context.WithTimeout in Go and pass the context to Do(ctx) methods of olivere/elastic services, or use elastic.RequestTimeout client option for client-wide timeout.
  4. Review Query Performance: Regularly review the performance of Elasticsearch queries built with olivere/elastic. Identify slow or resource-intensive queries and optimize them. Use Elasticsearch's profile API or query explain API for analysis.
  5. Control User Query Parameters: If users can influence query construction through your application, limit the complexity and range of parameters they can control to prevent abuse and DoS attempts.
• Threats Mitigated:
  • Denial of Service (DoS) (Medium Severity) - Prevents attackers from overwhelming the Elasticsearch cluster with excessively complex or large queries constructed via olivere/elastic, leading to performance degradation or service outages.
  • Resource Exhaustion (Medium Severity) - Protects Elasticsearch resources from being exhausted by poorly designed or malicious queries initiated through olivere/elastic.
  • Slow Performance (Medium Severity) - Improves overall application performance and responsiveness by preventing resource-intensive queries built with olivere/elastic from impacting other operations.
• Impact:
  • Denial of Service (DoS): Medium Risk Reduction
  • Resource Exhaustion: Medium Risk Reduction
  • Slow Performance: Medium Risk Reduction (Positive Impact)
• Currently Implemented: Query size limits are generally enforced in the application when using olivere/elastic. Timeouts are set for most Elasticsearch queries initiated by olivere/elastic.
• Missing Implementation: Complexity limits for queries built with olivere/elastic are not explicitly enforced. Proactive query performance monitoring and optimization for olivere/elastic usage could be improved. Rate limiting at the application level for Elasticsearch requests is not implemented.

Mitigation Strategy: Apply Data Minimization Principles in Queries Built with olivere/elastic

• Description:
  1. Specify Fields with FetchSourceContext or StoredFields: When building search queries using olivere/elastic's SearchService, explicitly specify the fields you need to retrieve using FetchSourceContext to include specific fields from _source or StoredFields to retrieve stored fields. Avoid using _source: true (default) or fetching all fields unnecessarily. Example using FetchSourceContext: searchService.FetchSourceContext(elastic.NewFetchSourceContext(true).Include("field1", "field2")).
  2. Retrieve Only Necessary Data: Design your application logic to retrieve only the data fields from Elasticsearch that are actually required for the current operation when using olivere/elastic. Avoid fetching entire documents if only a few fields are needed.
  3. Use Projection Queries: Utilize projection capabilities of olivere/elastic's query builders to select only the necessary fields. For example, in aggregations, specify only the fields needed for aggregation calculations.
  4. Review Data Retrieval Logic: Regularly review your application code that uses olivere/elastic to identify areas where unnecessary data is being retrieved from Elasticsearch and optimize queries to minimize data transfer.
• Threats Mitigated:
  • Accidental Data Exposure (Low Severity) - Reduces the risk of accidentally exposing sensitive data that is not needed for the current operation when retrieving data via olivere/elastic.
  • Data Breach (Low Severity) - Minimizes the amount of data that could be potentially compromised if there is a security breach involving data retrieved by olivere/elastic.
  • Performance Degradation (Low Severity) - Improves query performance and reduces network bandwidth usage by transferring less data when using olivere/elastic to interact with Elasticsearch.
• Impact:
  • Accidental Data Exposure: Low Risk Reduction
  • Data Breach: Low Risk Reduction
  • Performance Degradation: Low Risk Reduction (Positive Impact)
• Currently Implemented: Data minimization principles are generally followed in newer application components using olivere/elastic.
• Missing Implementation: Older parts of the application using olivere/elastic might still retrieve more data than necessary. Consistent enforcement and code reviews are needed to ensure data minimization across the entire application's olivere/elastic usage.

Mitigation Strategy: Regularly Review and Audit Application Code Interacting with olivere/elastic (Security Focus)

• Description:
  1. Scheduled Code Reviews (Security Focused): Conduct regular code reviews specifically focused on the application code that uses olivere/elastic to interact with Elasticsearch. Ensure these reviews include a security perspective.
  2. Review olivere/elastic Usage Patterns: During code reviews, pay close attention to how olivere/elastic is used, specifically focusing on:
     • Query construction and input validation for queries built with olivere/elastic.
     • Error handling for olivere/elastic operations.
     • Credential management for olivere/elastic clients.
     • Data handling of data retrieved from Elasticsearch using olivere/elastic.
  3. SAST Tools for olivere/elastic Code: Configure Static Analysis Security Testing (SAST) tools to specifically scan code for potential security vulnerabilities related to olivere/elastic usage, such as insecure query construction patterns or mishandling of sensitive data retrieved from Elasticsearch.
  4. Security Training on olivere/elastic: Provide security training to developers that includes best practices for secure coding with olivere/elastic, common pitfalls, and how to avoid introducing vulnerabilities when interacting with Elasticsearch using this library.
• Threats Mitigated:
  • Coding Errors Leading to Vulnerabilities in olivere/elastic Usage (Medium Severity) - Reduces the risk of introducing security vulnerabilities due to coding errors or insecure coding practices specifically when using olivere/elastic.
  • Undetected Vulnerabilities in olivere/elastic Interactions (Medium Severity) - Helps identify and address vulnerabilities in how the application interacts with Elasticsearch through olivere/elastic that might be missed during regular development and testing.
  • Security Misconfigurations Related to olivere/elastic (Medium Severity) - Reduces the likelihood of security misconfigurations in application code and specifically in how olivere/elastic clients and queries are configured.
• Impact:
  • Coding Errors Leading to Vulnerabilities in olivere/elastic Usage: Medium Risk Reduction
  • Undetected Vulnerabilities in olivere/elastic Interactions: Medium Risk Reduction
  • Security Misconfigurations Related to olivere/elastic: Medium Risk Reduction
• Currently Implemented: Code reviews are part of the development process, but security-focused reviews specifically for olivere/elastic interactions are not consistently performed. SAST tools are used for general code quality but not specifically configured for olivere/elastic security aspects.
• Missing Implementation: Dedicated security code reviews for olivere/elastic interactions, focused SAST configuration for olivere/elastic vulnerabilities, and enhanced security training for developers on secure olivere/elastic usage are not regularly conducted.