Hardening Teamwork Cloud

The default shipping configuration of Teamwork Cloud is not a hardened configuration.

When hardening an installation, there are variables that can render the installation inoperative, such as incompatibility of the supported ciphers in a certificate and the supported ciphers in the hardened configuration.

Furthermore, the default configurations assume that the deployment is behind a secure infrastructure, and therefore required ports are globally allowed.

Since some of Teamwork Cloud's infrastructure relies on available components, newly discovered vulnerabilities need to be mitigated during the life-cycle of the installation.

Below, we will cover the potentially exploitable vulnerabilities of the different components, as well as various steps to mitigate depending on the policies of the deploying organization.

Cassandra Port Access

When installing on Linux using our deployment scripts, all of the ports required by Cassandra for inter-node communication, as well as for the Teamwork Cloud nodes to communicate with Cassandra nodes are opened globally. This configuration is deployed mostly to facilitate testing of the environment upon installation, prior to taking any measures to harden the installation. If we check the firewall upon installation, we will see an output similar to the one below:

# firewall-cmd --list-all
public (active)
  target: default
  icmp-block-inversion: no
  interfaces: eth0
  sources:
  services: cassandra lmadmin ssh twcloud
  ports:
  protocols:
  masquerade: no
  forward-ports:
  source-ports:
  icmp-blocks:
  rich rules: