This topic describes the features, options, installation, and configuration of Honeycomb Secure Tenancy, also referred to as Secure Proxy. If you have questions or need assistance with any aspect of installing or configuring this functionality, contact us and we’ll help.
Secure Tenancy provides two options to address your security/compliance requirements while delivering access to the fine-grained observability that you need.
Both options make use of a Honeycomb Secure Proxy running in your infrastructure. No plaintext data ever traverses Honeycomb’s infrastructure and the Honeycomb UI presents complete transparency to authorized members of your team. You have complete control of key rotation and reissuance down to the columnar level from within your own infrastructure.
With Event Encryption, all strings in your datasets are encrypted and the keys are stored in a database on the Secure Proxy running in your infrastructure. When an authorized user accesses Honeycomb, their web browser connects to the Secure Proxy directly and the data is unencrypted for them. Honeycomb infrastructure never has access to the sensitive data in plaintext.
With Event Hashing, all strings in your datasets are hashed and the hash mappings are stored in a database on the Secure Proxy running in your infrastructure. When an authorized user accesses Honeycomb, their browser sends the hashed data to the Secure Proxy running in your environment and receives the un-hashed data back. Again, no plaintext sensitive data reaches the Honeycomb infrastructure.
All strings in your data are masked (encrypted or hashed) when you use Secure Tenancy. This includes all strings within your events, as well as column names, aliases, descriptions, derived column aliases, Board names, descriptions, and query captions, and any other string associated with your data.
Note: Trigger names and descriptions will not be masked by the secure proxy. Please only use names and descriptions that you feel comfortable storing in Honeycomb’s database and sending through third parties such as Slack or PagerDuty.
(Or two, if you wish to split encrypting and decrypting)
Configure the load balancer(s) with a signed certificate from a Certificate Authority. It (they) will serve as the entry point for both encryption and decryption.
Configure these instances to allow incoming traffic from applications on the internal network(s) where they are running and so that end users can access the endpoint when tunneled in to the company VPN.
The domain name and SSL certificate should be publicly resolvable, but the endpoint can be on a non-publicly-routable IP accessible within VPN.
The aforementioned LB will forward traffic to these. If possible, place the servers in separate availability zones.
The MySQL database should not be accessible by any programs other than the secure proxy.
Here’s an example configuration using AWS technology:
Note: If you’re planning to deploy to a higher level platform such as OpenShift, Mesos, Kubernetes, etc., contact us to get additional, more specific guidance for your platform.
The Honeycomb team will provide you with either a system package (such as a DEB or RPM) or a .tar.gz containing the elements required to run the Secure Proxy.
Note: If we provide a full package, you may not need to create some of the files/directories mentioned here manually, but rather edit their values.
If you choose to install elsewhere you must specify the location of the config file as a command line argument (-hnyconfig flag) to the binary.
$ mkdir -p /srv/hny
$ cd /srv/hny
$ <place file from above step in this directory>
$ tar --strip-components 1 -xjf <provided_tarball>Note: This is sensitive information and is not meant to be shared outside of the operator(s) of the Secure Proxy.
Run this command and make a note of its output:
$ head -c64 /dev/urandom | openssl dgst -sha256 -hex | sed -e 's/(stdin)= //' Add the key/token to the config file
Add the hash from the step above to /srv/hny/config/honeycomb.yml. The value must be in quotes: auth_token: "<token>"
Note: If you use a secret management tool such as Vault and wish to keep this secret there, do not add this line and instead set the HONEYCOMB_AUTH_TOKEN environment variable to the correct value when the proxy is started. Environment variables override the values from the config file, so if both are set, the values from the environment will be used.
Once you’ve installed MySQL on the database sever, create or edit /srv/hny/config/mysql.yml to include the following information so it is able to connect to the MySQL instance:
user: root
password: ""
host: localhost:3306
database: honeycomb_secure_proxy
maxopenconns: 100Use this command to create the database:
mysql -u root -e 'create database honeycomb_secure_proxy;'
Run the database migrations to populate the database schemas:
cd /srv/hny && \
bin/migrate -url "mysql://<user>:<password>@tcp(<host>:<port>)/honeycomb_secure_proxy" -path ./migrate upIf Secure Proxy is connecting to MySQL over TLS, set the tls key. The following values are supported:
host for ServerName
host)
To specify a non-default location for the MySQL config file, use the -mysqlconfig flag.
Do a pre-flight check to ensure that the Secure Proxy installation and the MySQL database it depends on are not accessible from outside the private network(s) they are installed in. The MySQL database contains the keys used to encrypt and decrypt information sent to Honeycomb, secure it from untrusted access.
This step is optional, but recommended.
You can help Honeycomb ensure the quality of our service by sending usage and debugging information from the Secure Proxy to Honeycomb. This data does not contain any sensitive information (such as masked events or encryption keys), and is available for you to access in your own Honeycomb account.
To enable sending proxy metrics, you must create a new team (one that isn’t in high security mode). Log into Honeycomb and go to https://ui.honeycomb.io/teams. On that page you’ll see Create Team with a field to create the new team.
Once you’ve created this team, get its writekey by going to https://ui.honeycomb.io/account and selecting the writekey listed under the team name. Set the libhoney_writekey parameter with the writekey in the file /srv/hny/config/honeycomb.yml:
libhoney_writekey: "<writekey>"`
Then, let us know the team name. This team for telemetry information is still under your control, and you can delete the dataset at any time you choose.
Create the following file: /lib/systemd/system/honeycomb_secure_proxy.service
Edit it to include the following:
[Unit]
Description=Honeycomb Secure Proxy
After=network.target
[Service]
ExecStart=/srv/hny/bin/honeycomb_secure_proxy
KillMode=process
Restart=on-failure
[Install]
Alias=honeycomb_secure_proxy honeycomb_secure_proxy.serviceReload the systemd process:
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
Start the system service:
sudo systemctl start honeycomb_secure_proxy
Enable it to start on boot:
sudo systemctl enable honeycomb_secure_proxy
By default the Secure Proxy will run on port 8080.
When you have deployed the Secure Proxy, configure SSL termination on the load balancer that fronts the proxy instances. If HTTP/HTTPS content is mixed, the Honeycomb browser UI will not load.
You must provide your auth token to Honeycomb before sending traffic through the secure proxy. Honeycomb will refuse all traffic when the token is missing or doesn’t match the token provided to the web app.
Go to the settings page for the relevant team by clicking the upper right hand avatar menu, clicking “All Teams”, and then clicking the “Settings” link for that team.
Look for the High Security Token field. Enter the auth token you generated earlier, then click outside the text field. Once you see “OK” appear below the text field, you can send data through your Secure Tenancy installation. These new settings may take a minute or so to propagate through our backend.
In the High Security Proxy URL field, enter the endpoint for your proxy (which should be available on company VPN).
Note: No one will be able to connect to the secure proxy directly and decrypt the data. There is a built in security layer that prevents this from happening.
For instance, if you’re using honeytail, add the –api_host flag for initial testing:
--api_host=https://our-staging-secure-proxy.yourcompany.com:8080
For language SDKs and Beelines, all config objects have an APIHost property which can be set to the same effect.
Once data is sent, you should see a new dataset appear and be able to query it in the Honeycomb UI.
Once you’ve sent some data to a dataset provisioned under Secure Tenancy, you can specify the fields you want Honeycomb to use to display trace waterfall diagrams. For more information about tracing in Honeycomb, review the Tracing documentation.
If you are a team owner, you can do this from the Definitions tab for that dataset’s settings:
When you’ve updated the field name(s) as desired, click Update. The tracing configuration is updated.
As a whole, Honeycomb will continue to work the same way it does for non-secure tenancy. However there are some limitations imposed by the Secure Proxy:
There is a health check endpoint at /x/healthcheck that checks the secure proxy’s dependencies: the Honeycomb API and the secure proxy’s database.
The health check will return a 200 if both dependencies are OK, or a 500 if any of the dependencies are down. Both 200 and 500 responses return JSON with more details.
Contact your Honeycomb account manager with any questions or you need assistance with any part of this installation process.