Skip to main content

#ChaosDB / Vulnerability in the Azure Cosmos DB Jupyter Notebook

By

On August 21, 2021, an Azure CosmosDB vulnerability was reported for all Azure CosmosDB instances that are using Jupyter Notebooks. Using an active Jupyter Notebook an attacker was able to put his hands on the Azure CosmosDB keys that could be used to get access to the Azure CosmosDB.

Wizz.io describes in detail how somebody can use the vulnerability to steal the primary keys of the Azure CosmosDB instance. The vulnerability is serious because provides full access to Azure CosmosDB instance, including the data itself. 
Microsoft Security Response Center provided a response to this vulnerability, including what were the actions that were taken by the Azure team to mitigate the problem.

You can find below key facts that we need to be aware when you talk about #ChaosDB

  • If you did not receive a notification over email or from Azure Portal you were not affected 
  • Until now Microsoft was not able to identify CosmosDB customers data that were accessed using this vulnerability by 3rd parties or security researches
  • Using Azure Diagnostic Logs you can identify all IPs that access the Azure CosmosDB, including the unusual ones. 
  • There is no way for a customer to know if their Jupyter Notebook integration with Azure CosmosDB was enabled. You can open a ticket to the Microsoft team to find out if the feature was enabled for your account. 
  • Microsoft notified over email and Azure Portal all customers that were affected by the vulnerability
  • The feature was disabled for all customers once the vulnerability was confirmed. 
  • If you activate the functionality, but you don't use it, it will be disabled automatically, as for other festures of Azure
  • The vulnerability existing only for Azure CosmosDB customers that were using Jupyter Notebook or created an Azure CosmosDB instance between 7-13 August 2021
  • A part of Azure Cosmos DB Jupyter notebooks features is in public preview. In general, customers are not using cloud services that are in public preview for production systems. 
What your team should do in the future:
  1. Establish a key/token rotation policy for all cloud and non-cloud resources where access is based on a key or token.
  2. Activate and use Azure Diagnostic Logs and Azure Defender to identify and spot unusual IPs that access your systems. 
    1. Azure Security Center - Alerts for Azure Cosmos DB
    2. Advanced Threat Protection for Azure Cosmos DB
  3. Don't use in production private and public preview services and features of cloud vendors.
  4. Review and invest in security best practices recommended by Azure CAF and AWS CAF (Cloud Adoption Framework), Azure WAF and AWS WAF (Well-Architecture Framework).
  5. Cloud governance is important, don't ignore it and invest in it.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to audit an Azure Cosmos DB

By
In this post, we will talk about how we can audit an Azure Cosmos DB database. Before jumping into the problem let us define the business requirement: As an Administrator I want to be able to audit all changes that were done to specific collection inside my Azure Cosmos DB. The requirement is simple, but can be a little tricky to implement fully. First of all when you are using Azure Cosmos DB or any other storage solution there are 99% odds that you’ll have more than one system that writes data to it. This means that you have or not have control on the systems that are doing any create/update/delete operations. Solution 1: Diagnostic Logs Cosmos DB allows us activate diagnostics logs and stream the output a storage account for achieving to other systems like Event Hub or Log Analytics. This would allow us to have information related to who, when, what, response code and how the access operation to our Cosmos DB was done. Beside this there is a field that specifies what was th...
Post a Comment
Read more

Can User Technical Profile Influence AI Architecture Decisions?

By
In the last few days, I ran a small experiment on Devin/Windsurf/Cascade, BMAD, and LLM-based architecture decisions. The initial concern was simple: if an AI coding assistant knows something about the user, for example, that the user is a Java developer or a .NET developer, can this information influence the architecture and technology stack that the AI will propose? This question is important because many companies are starting to use AI tools not only for coding but also for product discovery, architecture, documentation, and technical decision-making. If the AI is influenced by the developer's personal profile, the result may not be fully neutral. It may look like a business or architecture decision, but in reality, it may be partially shaped by the context of the person using the tool. The test was done using BMAD with Devin/Windsurf/Cascade. The scenario was a unified field service operations platform. The task was to let BMAD refine the product, define the architecture and s...
Post a Comment
Read more

ADO.NET provider with invariant name 'System.Data.SqlClient' could not be loaded

By
Today blog post will be started with the following error when running DB tests on the CI machine: threw exception: System.InvalidOperationException: The Entity Framework provider type 'System.Data.Entity.SqlServer.SqlProviderServices, EntityFramework.SqlServer' registered in the application config file for the ADO.NET provider with invariant name 'System.Data.SqlClient' could not be loaded. Make sure that the assembly-qualified name is used and that the assembly is available to the running application. See http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=260882 for more information. at System.Data.Entity.Infrastructure.DependencyResolution.ProviderServicesFactory.GetInstance(String providerTypeName, String providerInvariantName) This error happened only on the Continuous Integration machine. On the devs machines, everything has fine. The classic problem – on my machine it’s working. The CI has the following configuration: TeamCity .NET 4.51 EF 6.0.2 VS2013 It see...
8 comments
Read more