In order to guarantee security and privacy for the user, the Passdora system needs to be personalized on first boot. The reason for that is, that every system is cloned from the same operating system image generated from the setup script (#20).
That means that initially every device uses the same basic passwords for SSH, the database, etc. This is a security issue since the default passwords can be found in the open source code. Using these passwords everyone on the network could log into the Passdora system.
To prevent that from happening, the default passwords need to be replaced with randomly generated ones, when the system boots for the first time. These passwords will be displayed to the system administrator once and will then be deleted.
New Features
What feature(s) did you add? (Reasons)
- system can't use default passwords -> security issue
- prevent anyone from logging in to the system
- only system administrator is allowed to know the passwords
- customize the system so no two systems are the same -> security
How did you implement it/them?
The initialization script does the following things two personalize the system in order to keep it save and secure:
- update apt packages & Sequry/QUIQQER [a64bc5b0]
- set SSH password to a random 15-digit string [feb3d9d4]
- set database password to a random 15-digit string [feb3d9d4]
- reset Sequry/QUIQQER administrator password to a random string [ec2efc84]
- temporarily store these passwords so they can be displayed to the user once
- generate self-signed HTTPS certificates [c41b5d64]
- generate random system restore-key [e04b96b3]
- display the system's IP where the administrator can view the generated passwords [4ca1d3dd]
- once the administrator copied/printed the passwords they are removed [6106e28d]
Here is an overview of the initializing process:
Thanks for reading
Jan, for PCSG Developers
Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors