MongoDB Secure Mode

Security in MongoDB is relatively young in terms of features and granularity. Interestingly, they indicate that a typical use case would be to use Mongo on a trusted network “much like how one would use, say, memcached.”

MongoDB does NOT run in secure mode by default.

As it is, the features that are available are standard, proven and probably sufficient for most use cases. Here’s a quick summary of pros and cons.

• Pros
• Nonce-based digest for authentication
• Security applies across replica set nodes and shard members
• Cons
• Few recent replies on security wiki page
• Course grained access control

User access levels

Course grained access control allows for users to be defined per database and given either read only or read/write access. Since there is no rigid schema in MongoDB, it’s not possible to limit access to a subset of collections or documents.

Limit to expected IPs

Along the lines of the ‘trusted network’ mentioned above, it’s recommended to configure each mongo instance to accept connections from specific ports. For example, you could limit access to the loopback address, or to an IP for a local private network.

Disable http interface

By default, a useful HTTP based interface provides information about the mongodb instance on a machine and links to similar interfaces on related machines in the replica set. This can be disabled by providing –nohttpinterface when starting mongod.

SSL ready

In cases where SSL security is required, Mongo can be compiled to include support for it. The standard downloads do not include this feature. A standard SSL key can be produced in the usual way, using openssl for example.