rebrow

rebrow was added to Skyline in the Ionosphere branch, however Skyline uses a modified port of Marian Steinbach’s excellent rebrow Redis browser. rebrow was developed and meant as a localhost application only and by default is not secure, especially not to be run on any publicly accessible server.

rebrow makes Skyline development AND having to administer multiple Redis instances, very handy to have, it is very nice and easy to have a web UI view of Redis.

Further, being able to easily view Skyline metric sets such as:

  • analyzer.boring
  • analyzer.too_short
  • analyzer.stale

Is very useful to understanding your metric pipelines and often can be used to inform you on any namespaces that are not spending metrics frequently, etc. This is can be very useful at finding metrics that you thought you were sending constantly, but apparently not. Therefore in itself rebrow is extremely useful in finding possible or occasional misconfiguration in some of your metrics. rebrow allows you to browse through and see your data which makes it a make tool for discovering things about your metrics and Redis.

For these reasons, Skyline runs a ported version of Marian Steinbach’s rebrow in the webapp itself, this ported version is modified in the following ways:

  • The rebrow’s pubsub functionality has not been ported as Skyline does not need it.
  • The Webapp ported version requires authentication in Flask (http basic auth over SSL)
  • It reads and converts msgpack formatted keys to a rebrowable, veiwable format.
  • It adds the ability to authenticate with Redis, inspired by the elky84 PR https://github.com/marians/rebrow/pull/20 which adds very basic Redis auth to rebrow (not really fit for production but inspiring)
  • To make Rebrow Redis authentication production suitable, JWT encoding has been add to a encoded token instead of the password parameter that the elky84 PR describes.

The Skyline set up is aimed and building Skyline as reasonably hard as possible, with the requirement for authentication and SSL encryption on the Skyline Webapp frontend proxy (Apache or nginx) and the addition of a JWT encoded json payload as the token, in combination with a client_id (simple md5 hash of client ip and the client user agent) and a salt which is sent in a POST over a SSL encrypted connection (but then does become a URL parameter), Skyline does manage to make rebrow more suited to deployment in a non localhost environment

It could still be compromised if an attacker knew your IP, your user agent, the token and the salt, and they had access to an authorized IP address and authenticated against Skyline, then if they sent spoofed X-Forwarded-For and User Agent headers, your token and the salt, then yes they could delete all your Skyline Redis keys.

These further modifications to rebrow were required with the introduction of Luminosity, which needs the ability to query multiple Redis instances to run cross correlations for Skyline is deployed in multiple locations.