1.6. Security

In this document, we’ll look at the basic security mechanisms in CouchDB: the Admin Party, Basic Authentication, Cookie Authentication; how CouchDB handles users and protects their credentials.

1.6.1. Authentication

The Admin Party

When you start out fresh, CouchDB allows any request to be made by anyone. Create a database? No problem, here you go. Delete some documents? Same deal. CouchDB calls this the Admin Party. Everybody has privileges to do anything. Neat.

While it is incredibly easy to get started with CouchDB that way, it should be obvious that putting a default installation into the wild is adventurous. Any rogue client could come along and delete a database.

A note of relief: by default, CouchDB will listen only on your loopback network interface (127.0.0.1 or localhost) and thus only you will be able to make requests to CouchDB, nobody else. But when you start to open up your CouchDB to the public (that is, by telling it to bind to your machine’s public IP address), you will want to think about restricting access so that the next bad guy doesn’t ruin your admin party.

In our previous discussions, we dropped some keywords about how things without the Admin Party work. First, there’s admin itself, which implies some sort of super user. Then there are privileges. Let’s explore these terms a little more.

CouchDB has the idea of an admin user (e.g. an administrator, a super user, or root) that is allowed to do anything to a CouchDB installation. By default, everybody is an admin. If you don’t like that, you can create specific admin users with a username and password as their credentials.

CouchDB also defines a set of requests that only admin users are allowed to do. If you have defined one or more specific admin users, CouchDB will ask for identification for certain requests:

• Creating a database (PUT /database)
• Deleting a database (DELETE /database)
• Setup a database security (PUT /database/_security)
• Creating a design document (PUT /database/_design/app)
• Updating a design document (PUT /database/_design/app?rev=1-4E2)
• Deleting a design document (DELETE /database/_design/app?rev=2-6A7)
• Execute a temporary view (POST /database/_temp_view)
• Triggering compaction (POST /database/_compact)
• Reading the task status list (GET /_active_tasks)
• Restarting the server (POST /_restart)
• Reading the active configuration (GET /_config)
• Updating the active configuration (PUT /_config/section/key)

Creating New Admin User

Let’s do another walk through the API using curl to see how CouchDB behaves when you add admin users.

> HOST="http://127.0.0.1:5984"
> curl -X PUT $HOST/database
{"ok":true}

When starting out fresh, we can add a database. Nothing unexpected. Now let’s create an admin user. We’ll call her anna, and her password is secret. Note the double quotes in the following code; they are needed to denote a string value for the configuration API:

> curl -X PUT $HOST/_config/admins/anna -d '"secret"'
""

As per the _config API’s behavior, we’re getting the previous value for the config item we just wrote. Since our admin user didn’t exist, we get an empty string.

Hashing Passwords

Seeing the plain-text password is scary, isn’t it? No worries, CouchDB doesn’t show up the plain-text password anywhere. It gets hashed right away. The hash is that big, ugly, long string that starts out with -hashed-. How does that work?

1. Creates a new 128-bit UUID. This is our salt.
2. Creates a sha1 hash of the concatenation of the bytes of the plain-text password and the salt (sha1(password + salt)).
3. Prefixes the result with -hashed- and appends ,salt.

To compare a plain-text password during authentication with the stored hash, the same procedure is run and the resulting hash is compared to the stored hash. The probability of two identical hashes for different passwords is too insignificant to mention (c.f. Bruce Schneier). Should the stored hash fall into the hands of an attacker, it is, by current standards, way too inconvenient (i.e., it’d take a lot of money and time) to find the plain-text password from the hash.

But what’s with the -hashed- prefix? When CouchDB starts up, it reads a set of .ini files with config settings. It loads these settings into an internal data store (not a database). The config API lets you read the current configuration as well as change it and create new entries. CouchDB is writing any changes back to the .ini files.

The .ini files can also be edited by hand when CouchDB is not running. Instead of creating the admin user as we showed previously, you could have stopped CouchDB, opened your local.ini, added anna = secret to the admins, and restarted CouchDB. Upon reading the new line from local.ini, CouchDB would run the hashing algorithm and write back the hash to local.ini, replacing the plain-text password. To make sure CouchDB only hashes plain-text passwords and not an existing hash a second time, it prefixes the hash with -hashed-, to distinguish between plain-text passwords and hashed passwords. This means your plain-text password can’t start with the characters -hashed-, but that’s pretty unlikely to begin with.

Note

Since 1.3.0 release CouchDB uses -pbkdf2- prefix by default to sign about using PBKDF2 hashing algorithm instead of SHA1.

Basic Authentication

Now that we have defined an admin, CouchDB will not allow us to create new databases unless we give the correct admin user credentials. Let’s verify:

> curl -X PUT $HOST/somedatabase
{"error":"unauthorized","reason":"You are not a server admin."}

That looks about right. Now we try again with the correct credentials:

> HOST="http://anna:secret@127.0.0.1:5984"
> curl -X PUT $HOST/somedatabase
{"ok":true}

If you have ever accessed a website or FTP server that was password-protected, the username:password@ URL variant should look familiar.

If you are security conscious, the missing s in http:// will make you nervous. We’re sending our password to CouchDB in plain text. This is a bad thing, right? Yes, but consider our scenario: CouchDB listens on 127.0.0.1 on a development box that we’re the sole user of. Who could possibly sniff our password?

If you are in a production environment, however, you need to reconsider. Will your CouchDB instance communicate over a public network? Even a LAN shared with other collocation customers is public. There are multiple ways to secure communication between you or your application and CouchDB that exceed the scope of this documentation. CouchDB as of version 1.1.0 comes with SSL built in.

See also

Basic Authentication API Reference

Cookie Authentication

Basic authentication that uses plain-text passwords is nice and convenient, but not very secure if no extra measures are taken. It is also a very poor user experience. If you use basic authentication to identify admins, your application’s users need to deal with an ugly, unstylable browser modal dialog that says non-professional at work more than anything else.

To remedy some of these concerns, CouchDB supports cookie authentication. With cookie authentication your application doesn’t have to include the ugly login dialog that the users’ browsers come with. You can use a regular HTML form to submit logins to CouchDB. Upon receipt, CouchDB will generate a one-time token that the client can use in its next request to CouchDB. When CouchDB sees the token in a subsequent request, it will authenticate the user based on the token without the need to see the password again. By default, a token is valid for 10 minutes.

To obtain the first token and thus authenticate a user for the first time, the username and password must be sent to the _session API. The API is smart enough to decode HTML form submissions, so you don’t have to resort to any smarts in your application.

If you are not using HTML forms to log in, you need to send an HTTP request that looks as if an HTML form generated it. Luckily, this is super simple:

> HOST="http://127.0.0.1:5984"
> curl -vX POST $HOST/_session \
       -H 'Content-Type:application/x-www-form-urlencoded' \
       -d 'name=anna&password=secret'

CouchDB replies, and we’ll give you some more detail:

< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< Set-Cookie: AuthSession=YW5uYTo0QUIzOTdFQjrC4ipN-D-53hw1sJepVzcVxnriEw;
< Version=1; Path=/; HttpOnly
> ...
<
{"ok":true}

A 200 OK response code tells us all is well, a Set-Cookie header includes the token we can use for the next request, and the standard JSON response tells us again that the request was successful.

Now we can use this token to make another request as the same user without sending the username and password again:

> curl -vX PUT $HOST/mydatabase \
       --cookie AuthSession=YW5uYTo0QUIzOTdFQjrC4ipN-D-53hw1sJepVzcVxnriEw \
       -H "X-CouchDB-WWW-Authenticate: Cookie" \
       -H "Content-Type:application/x-www-form-urlencoded"
{"ok":true}

You can keep using this token for 10 minutes by default. After 10 minutes you need to authenticate your user again. The token lifetime can be configured with the timeout (in seconds) setting in the couch_httpd_auth configuration section.

See also

Cookie Authentication API Reference

1.6.2. Authentication Database

You may already note, that CouchDB administrators are defined within config file and you now wondering does regular users are also stored there. No, they don’t. CouchDB has special authentication database – _users by default – that stores all registered users as JSON documents.

CouchDB uses special database (called _users by default) to store information about registered users. This is a system database – this means that while it shares common database API, there are some special security-related constraints applied and used agreements on documents structure. So how authentication database is different from others?

• Only administrators may browse list of all documents (GET /_users/_all_docs)
• Only administrators may listen changes feed (GET /_users/_changes)
• Only administrators may execute design functions like views, shows and others
• Only administrators may GET, PUT or DELETE any document (to be honest, that they always can do)
• There is special design document _auth that cannot be modified
• Every document (of course, except design documents) represents registered CouchDB users and belong to them
• Users may only access (GET /_users/org.couchdb.user:Jan) or modify (PUT /_users/org.couchdb.user:Jan) documents that they owns

These draconian rules are reasonable: CouchDB cares about user’s personal information and doesn’t discloses it for everyone. Often, users documents are contains not only system information like login, password hash and roles, but also sensitive personal information like: real name, email, phone, special internal identifications and more - this is not right information that you want to share with the World.

Users Documents

Each CouchDB user is stored in document format. These documents are contains several mandatory fields, that CouchDB handles for correct authentication process:

• _id (string): Document ID. Contains user’s login with special prefix Why org.couchdb.user: prefix?
• derived_key (string): PBKDF2 key
• name (string): User’s name aka login. Immutable e.g. you cannot rename existed user - you have to create new one
• roles (array of string): List of user roles. CouchDB doesn’t provides any builtin roles, so you’re free to define your own depending on your needs. However, you cannot set system roles like _admin there. Also, only administrators may assign roles to users - by default all users have no roles
• password_sha (string): Hashed password with salt. Used for simple password_scheme
• password_scheme (string): Password hashing scheme. May be simple or pbkdf2
• salt (string): Hash salt. Used for simple password_scheme
• type (string): Document type. Constantly have value user

Additionally, you may specify any custom fields that are relates to the target user. This is good place to store user’s private information because only the target user and CouchDB administrators may browse it.

Why org.couchdb.user: prefix?

The reason to have special prefix before user’s login name is to have namespaces which users are belongs to. This prefix is designed to prevent replication conflicts when you’ll try to merge two _user databases or more.

For current CouchDB releases, all users are belongs to the same org.couchdb.user namespace and this cannot be changed, but we’d made such design decision for future releases.

Creating New User

Creating new user is a very trivial operation. You need just to send single PUT request with user’s data to CouchDB. Let’s create user with login jan and password apple:

curl -X PUT http://localhost:5984/_users/org.couchdb.user:jan \
     -H "Accept: application/json" \
     -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
     -d '{"name": "jan", "password": "apple", "roles": [], "type": "user"}'

This curl command will produce next HTTP request:

PUT /_users/org.couchdb.user:jan HTTP/1.1
Accept: application/json
Content-Length: 62
Content-Type: application/json
Host: localhost:5984
User-Agent: curl/7.31.0

And CouchDB responds with:

HTTP/1.1 201 Created
Cache-Control: must-revalidate
Content-Length: 83
Content-Type: application/json
Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2013 07:33:28 GMT
ETag: "1-e0ebfb84005b920488fc7a8cc5470cc0"
Location: http://localhost:5984/_users/org.couchdb.user:jan
Server: CouchDB (Erlang OTP)

{"ok":true,"id":"org.couchdb.user:jan","rev":"1-e0ebfb84005b920488fc7a8cc5470cc0"}

Document successfully created what also means that user jan have created too! Let’s check is this true:

curl -X POST http://localhost:5984/_session -d 'name=jan&password=apple'

CouchDB should respond with:

{"ok":true,"name":"jan","roles":[]}

Which means that username was recognized and password’s hash matches with stored one. If we specify wrong login and/or password, CouchDB will notify us with the next error message:

{"error":"unauthorized","reason":"Name or password is incorrect."}

Password Changing

This is quite common situation: user had forgot their password, it was leaked somehow (via copy-paste, screenshot, or by typing in wrong chat window) or something else. Let’s change password for our user jan.

First of all, let’s define what is the password changing from the point of CouchDB and the authentication database. Since “users” are “documents”, this operation is nothing, but updating the document with special field password which contains the plain text password. Scared? No need to: the authentication database has special internal hook on document update which looks for this field and replaces it with the secured hash, depending on chosen password_scheme.

Summarizing above, we need to get document content, add password field with new plain text password value and store JSON result to the authentication database.

curl -X GET http://localhost:5984/_users/org.couchdb.user:jan

{
  "_id": "org.couchdb.user:jan",
  "_rev": "1-e0ebfb84005b920488fc7a8cc5470cc0",
  "derived_key": "e579375db0e0c6a6fc79cd9e36a36859f71575c3",
  "iterations": 10,
  "name": "jan",
  "password_scheme": "pbkdf2",
  "roles": [],
  "salt": "1112283cf988a34f124200a050d308a1",
  "type": "user"
}

Here is our user’s document. We may strip hashes from stored document to reduce amount of posted data:

curl -X PUT http://localhost:5984/_users/org.couchdb.user:jan \
     -H "Accept: application/json" \
     -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
     -H "If-Match: 1-e0ebfb84005b920488fc7a8cc5470cc0" \
     -d '{"name":"jan", "roles":[], "type":"user", "password":"orange"}'

{"ok":true,"id":"org.couchdb.user:jan","rev":"2-ed293d3a0ae09f0c624f10538ef33c6f"}

Updated! Now let’s check that password was really changed:

curl -X POST http://localhost:5984/_session -d 'name=jan&password=apple'

CouchDB should respond with:

{"error":"unauthorized","reason":"Name or password is incorrect."}

Looks like the password apple is wrong, what about orange?

curl -X POST http://localhost:5984/_session -d 'name=jan&password=orange'

CouchDB should respond with:

{"ok":true,"name":"jan","roles":[]}

Hooray! You may wonder why so complex: need to retrieve user’s document, add special field to it, post it back - where is one big button that changes the password without worry about document’s content? Actually, Futon has such at the right bottom corner if you have logged in - all implementation details are hidden from your sight.

Note

There is no password confirmation for API request: you should implement it on your application layer like Futon does.

Users Public Information

New in version 1.4.

Sometimes users wants to share some information with the World. For instance, their contact email to let other users get in touch with them. To solve this problem, but still keep sensitive and private information secured there is special configuration option public_fields. In this options you may define comma separated list of users document fields that will be publicity available.

Normally, if you request any user’s document and you’re not administrator or this document owner, CouchDB will respond with 404 Not Found:

curl http://localhost:5984/_users/org.couchdb.user:robert

{"error":"not_found","reason":"missing"}

This response is constant for both cases when user exists or not exists - by security reasons.

Now let’s share field name. First, setup the public_fields configuration option. Remember, that this action requires administrator’s privileges and the next command will ask for password for user admin, assuming that they are the server administrator:

curl -X PUT http://localhost:5984/_config/couch_http_auth/public_fields \
     -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
     -d '"name"' \
     -u admin

What have changed? Let’s check Robert’s document once again:

curl http://localhost:5984/_users/org.couchdb.user:robert

{"_id":"org.couchdb.user:robert","_rev":"6-869e2d3cbd8b081f9419f190438ecbe7","name":"robert"}

Good news! Now we may read field name from every user’s document without need to be an administrator. That’s important note: don’t publish sensitive information, especially without user’s acknowledge - they may not like such actions from your side.