Node-RED user api to restart the application (Node-RED)

[TotallyInformation]

@TotallyInformation

Which reminds me of something I meant to do. I'll add a comment to the security FAQ entry to remind people to protect settings.js from Node-RED itself.

Added, hopefully others will add their thoughts too.

Protecting Node-RED from itself

Because Node-RED is a general-purpose computing tool, it has the capabilities to make changes to the underlying Operating System environment. So if you want your instance of Node-RED to be "safe", especially in production and customer environments, it is important to prevent Node-RED from making changes to its own environment. Here are the things you should certainly do as a minimum if you need a secure environment: Protect settings.js While you cannot prevent it from changing certain thin…

@Colin

Did you realise that the specific suggestion was to allow the node-red user to use sudo with only the node red restart and reboot commands and nothing else? That does not sound particularly dangerous, or am I missing something?

I did, yes. But as with anything related to security, it is easy to take a specific suggestion and generalise it without thinking through the consequences.

Things are protected by sudo for really good reasons, it isn't done lightly. So undoing that - especially if allowing access to editors who possibly don't understand operating system security - is going to have consequences.

In this case, the most obvious would be accidental or deliberate denial-of-service.

There are some things that, while you CAN do them in Node-RED (because it is a great compute environment), doesn't mean that you SHOULD.

There are other, non-Node-RED methods for restarting services which is something that should indeed be restricted to an admin separate to a Node-RED admin. Similarly, you don't HAVE to install/update/remove node modules from Node-RED itself. It is a nice feature but probably terrible in a production environment. In such cases set up a separate admin script that an OS admin has to run. Maybe use Node-RED to create a request form so that your users can still request changes to node modules but an OS admin has to actually run them after due dilligence.

[jbudd]

@TotallyInformation

In such cases set up a separate admin script that an OS admin has to run. Maybe use Node-RED to create a request form so that your users can still request changes to node modules but an OS admin has to actually run them after due dilligence.

What is this world of OS administrators, request forms and due diligence?

[TotallyInformation]

Sorry, I've let me professional life bleed into the world of Node-RED!