I'm reaching out to our user community to get opinions on what Solr should do to be more secure-by-default.
TL;DR: Solr 9 has better secure-by-defaults, but maybe we should do more like have Solr pick some of it's default settings dependent on a new env=dev|prod. I was shown a glimpse of a massive list of Solr servers exposed on the public internet by a security researcher. I'm kinda blown away that so many people would be so careless. I think Solr could and should run with better "secure-by-default" settings. The situation will be much better in Solr 9 -- and I'll give a shout-out of thanks to Rob Muir for helping make this so. Here's a couple prominent ones: * Solr's Jetty now binds to localhost by default, configurable via SOLR_JETTY_HOST. Before 9, you can configure a similar thing in the Jetty config files. SOLR-13985 * Java's SecurityManager sandbox is enabled by default. -- SOLR-13984. This option also exists in Solr since 8.5, toggle-able via SOLR_SECURITY_MANAGER_ENABLED. Mostly this prevents the worst of security bugs -- RCE. I wonder if users will promptly set SOLR_JETTY_HOST=0.0.0.0 to get anything done? I think so... but it's something, protecting some users. Perhaps Solr ought to default to requiring a username/password? I've heard this suggestion and it's an obvious one even if some of us (me included) worry that it would make it too annoying to play with Solr when getting started. I think the concerns could be mitigated based on the approach. If Solr had an opt-in env=dev setting, for example, then Solr could not insist on authentication, whereas a default env=prod would insist. Of course the authentication or lack thereof could be explicitly configured or disabled at the user's prerogative. What I like about an "env" setting is that many other settings could be gated on this as well. I particularly like the idea of an env=dev|prod setting because a variety of settings in Solr could have a default that is dependent on this value. In particular I argue that a env=prod should result in Solr's config APIs being disabled -- equivalent to -Ddisable.configEdit=true. I believe a minority of Solr users actually use these APIs, yet they are frequently a step in exploiting weaknesses in Solr. ~ David Smiley Apache Lucene/Solr Search Developer http://www.linkedin.com/in/davidwsmiley
