Is anyone on this list aware of discussions about locking down/securing R? My colleagues and I are working with health statistics in an office that disallows many useful tools (e.g. emacs, vim, perl, make) on the grounds that they represent a security risk. We are considering pushing back, but we are worried that if we attract the attention of the Powers That Be to the reality that R allows execution of arbitrary shell commands, they will then disallow the use of R (SAS and Stata are our other optiona). It might be useful to be able to give them options for securing R. Possibly useful information: * the office allows use of SAS (and Stata, MLWiN, etc.) but uses the NOXCMD specification to prevent shell access from within SAS. They also disallow access to the Windows shell (in the current configuration, shell() works fine from within R, but we think this may have escaped their notice ...) The workstations have no access to external networks, nor to external media (thumb drives etc.) [information transfer to the outside world is via shared drives that can be accessed by administrators with network access]. * I stipulate that (1) the security policies don't make sense, (2) allowing users access to arbitrary shell commands should _not_ represent a security risk on a well-administered, modern operating system (they're running WinXP), (3) R probably offers many other avenues for system access to a malicious user, even in the absence of shell access, compilers, etc.. * I suspect the answer given here will be "if you really want to secure R, run it within a standard restricted-access shell (e.g. chroot on a Linux system)". If anyone has experience of 'locking down' R on Windows (XP) in a sensitive environment, I'd be curious about the details. thanks Ben Bolker
On Sun, May 19, 2013 at 7:16 PM, Ben Bolker <bbolker at gmail.com> wrote:> > Is anyone on this list aware of discussions about locking down/securing R? > > My colleagues and I are working with health statistics in an office > that disallows many useful tools (e.g. emacs, vim, perl, make) on the > grounds that they represent a security risk. We are considering pushing > back, but we are worried that if we attract the attention of the Powers > That Be to the reality that R allows execution of arbitrary shell > commands, they will then disallow the use of R (SAS and Stata are our > other optiona). It might be useful to be able to give them options for > securing R. > > Possibly useful information: > > * the office allows use of SAS (and Stata, MLWiN, etc.) but uses the > NOXCMD specification to prevent shell access from within SAS. They also > disallow access to the Windows shell (in the current configuration, > shell() works fine from within R, but we think this may have escaped > their notice ...) The workstations have no access to external networks, > nor to external media (thumb drives etc.) [information transfer to the > outside world is via shared drives that can be accessed by > administrators with network access]. > > * I stipulate that (1) the security policies don't make sense, (2) > allowing users access to arbitrary shell commands should _not_ represent > a security risk on a well-administered, modern operating system (they're > running WinXP), (3) R probably offers many other avenues for system > access to a malicious user, even in the absence of shell access, > compilers, etc..If you really mean a "modern operating system"... ;-) http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.4808 Cheers, MW> > * I suspect the answer given here will be "if you really want to secure > R, run it within a standard restricted-access shell (e.g. chroot on a > Linux system)". If anyone has experience of 'locking down' R on Windows > (XP) in a sensitive environment, I'd be curious about the details. > > thanks > Ben Bolker > > ______________________________________________ > R-devel at r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
On Sun, May 19, 2013 at 7:16 PM, Ben Bolker <bbolker at gmail.com> wrote:> >The workstations have no access to external networks, > nor to external media (thumb drives etc.) [information transfer to the > outside world is via shared drives that can be accessed by > administrators with network access]. > > * I stipulate that (1) the security policies don't make sense,Correct. If the machines aren't on an external network and have no removable media then this isn't about security from the outside hacker, its about trust. The organisation does not trust YOU. (2)> allowing users access to arbitrary shell commands should _not_ represent > a security risk on a well-administered, modern operating system (they're > running WinXP),When does WinXP go out of support? Even so, the PC isn't on the network right? So what's the security issue? Doesn't make sense. You can't stomp on other people's files. Would it matter if you could accidentally see other people's files because they set permissions loosely? How compartmentalised are the projects? (3) R probably offers many other avenues for system> access to a malicious user, even in the absence of shell access, > compilers, etc..The 'malicious user' here is on the inside. The only way to get on the machine is to be physically there? Then a malicious user can only be a trusted user gone bad. A sufficiently malicious user with hardware access can (nearly) always break the thing open and get at the data (even if it comes down to reading data lines with a tap to get at unencrypted streams). Tell the security guys they need to lock the PCs up in a room and provide thin client access over a secure private network at once. Enjoy your new Windows Client Access License costs. Glad I don't work for someone like that. Barry