Rebus Pub / Sub Encryption - rebus

Is it possible to turn of message encryption on subscription messages?
We want to let external parties subscribe to messages via AzureServiceBus and SAS keys pr queue, but we use Encryption of messages and don't want to expose that key to external parties.
One way is to create another bus to that, but that just seems complicated, is there another way?
Also want to thank you for quick repons here on Stack overflow and a great product.

You could probably achieve what you want by wrapping the outgoing step that encrypts the message body in something that would decide to invoke the step (and thus encrypt the body) or not, depending on the message's intent value in the headers, but I think that is a little bit icky.
The reason I think it is icky, is because I think you should treat your encrypted bus as an internally used bus only, and then have a completely separate bus that you use to publish messages to third parties.
This separation would have the benefit that you can update internal message schemas etc. without worrying about breaking anything in the integration with your external parties.

Related

Event-sourcing: when (and not) should I use Message Queue?

I am building a project from scratch using event-sourcing with Java and Cassandra.
My apps we be based on microservices and in some use cases information will be processed asynchronously. I was wondering what part a Message Queue (such as Rabbit, Active MQ Artemis, Kafka, etc) would play to improve the technology stack in this environment and if I understand the scenarios if I won't use it.
I would start with separating messaging infrastructure like RabbitMQ from event streaming/storing/processing like Kafka. These are two different things made for two (or more) different purposes.
Concerning the event sourcing, you have to have a place where you must store events. This storage must be append-only and support fast reads of unstructured data based on an identity. One example of such persistence is the EventStore.
Event sourcing goes together with CQRS, which means you have to project your changes (event) to another store, which you can query. This is done by projecting events to that store, this is where events get processed to change the domain object state. It is important to understand that using message infrastructure for projections is generally a bad idea. This is due to the nature of messaging and two-phase commit issue.
If you look at how events get persisted, you can see that they get saved to the store as one transaction. If you then need to publish events, this will be another transaction. Since you are dealing with two different pieces of infrastructure, things can get broken.
The messaging issue as such is that messages are usually guaranteed to be delivered "at least once" and the order of messages is usually not guaranteed. Also, when your message consumer fails and NACKs the message, it will be redelivered but usually a bit later, again breaking the sequence.
The ordering and duplication concerns, whoever, do not apply to event streaming servers like Kafka. Also, the EventStore will guarantee once only event delivery in order if you use catch-up subscription.
In my experience, messages are used to send commands and to implement event-driven architecture to connect independent services in a reactive way. Event stores, at the other hand, are used to persist events and only events that get there are then projected to the query store and also get published to the message bus.
Make sure you are clear on the distinction between send(command) and publish(event). Udi Dahan touches on that topic in his essay on busses and brokers.
In most cases where you are event sourcing, you do not want to be reconstructing state from published events. If you need state, then query the technical authority/book of record for the history, and reconstruct the state from the history.
On the other hand, event driven activity off of a message queue should be fine. When a single event (plus the subscriber's state) has everything you need, then running off of the bus is fine.
In some cases, you might do both. For example, if you were updating cached views, you'd subscribe to various BobChanged events to know when your cached data was stale; to rebuild a stale view, you would reload a representation of the history and transform it into an updated view.
In the world of event-sourcing applications, message queues usually allow you to implement publish-subscribe pattern style of communication between producers and consumers. Also, they usually help you with delivery guarantees: which messages were delivered to which subscribers and which ones were not.
But they don't store all messages indefinitely. You need to have an event store to do any kind of event sourcing.
The question is not 'to queue or not to queue', but it is more like:
can this thing store huge volume of events indefinitely?
does it have publish-subscribe capabilities?
does it provide at-least-once delivery guarantees?
So, you should use something like Kafka or EventStore to have all that out-of-the-box. Alternatively, you can combine event store with message queue manually, but this is going to be more involved.

Is end-to-end encryption possible with Realm Mobile Platform?

On the client device, a synced Realm can be setup with an encryption key that's unique to the user and stored on the device keychain, so data is stored encrypted on the client.
(related question: Can "data at rest" in the Realm Mobile Platform be encrypted?)
Realm Object Server and the clients can communicate via TLS, so data is encrypted in transit.
But the Realm Object Server does not appear to store data using encryption, since an admin user is able to access all the database contents via Realm Browser (https://realm.io/docs/realm-object-server/#data-browser).
Is it possible to setup Realm Mobile Platform so user data is encrypted end-to-end, such as no one but the user (not even server admins) have access to the decryption key?
Due to the way we handle conflict resolution, we currently are unable to provide end-to-end encryption, as you correctly deduced. Let's go a tiny bit into detail with regards to the conflict resolution.
In order to handle conflicts the way we do, we use something called operational transformation. This means that instead of sending the data over directly, the client tells the server the intent of the change, rather than the result. For example, when two users edit a text field, we would tell the server insert(data='new text', offset=0) because the first user prepended data at the beginning of the text field, and insert(data='some more stuff', offset=10) because the second user added data in the middle of the field. These two separate operations allow the server to uniquely resolve what happened, and have conflictless resolution of the two writes.
This also means that if we encrypt everything, the server would be unable to handle this conflict resolution.
This being said, that's for the current version. We do have a number of thoughts on how we could handle this in the future, while providing (some degree) of encryption. Mainly this would mean more work on the client, and maybe find a new algorithm that would allow us to tell the client the intent, and let the client figure out how to merge everything. This is a quadratic problem, though, so we're reticent to putting too much work on the client side, as it could really drain the battery.
That might be acceptable for some users, which is why we're looking into it. Basically, there will be a trade-off. As the old adage goes: fast, secure, convenient: pick two. We just have to figure out how to handle this properly.
I just opened a feature request around possibly using Tresorit's ZeroKit to solve the end-to-end encryption question posed. Sounds like the conflict resolution implementation will still cause an issue though, but maybe there is a different conflict resolution level that can be applied for those that don't need the realtime dynamic editing of individual data fields (like patient health data, where only a single clinician ever really edits a record at any given time).
https://github.com/realm/realm-mobile-platform/issues/96

asterisk get credit card info

I`m trying to build a script that will capture the credit card info like card number,cvc and expiration date using asterisk 11.x and asterisk-java library for AMI/AGI integration.
Right now I am able to build a script that will acquire that info if it is called via dialplan but i have a different scenario:
1. A call enters a queue.
2. An agent from the specific queue answer the call
3. The caller wants to input the card details
4. After the caller has entered the card details is redirected back to agent to continue the call.
My specific problem is related to step 3 as I do not know how to route the caller to my AGI and then back to the same agent. (eventually the agents has to be still involved in (some) call to guarantee that when the caller returns from agi it is still available)
Any idea how can I achieve that ? I know that this is a common practice so I think that there has to be a way.
When the call is delivered to the agent, use a macro to set a custom channel variable with the agent ID or extension in it.
Then, when your credit-card authentication function is done, read the variable and use an AGI command to transfer the call back to the agent.
Further Reading
http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Asterisk+variables
http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Asterisk+manager+Example:+Transfer
Note if this solution solves your problem, please 'accept' it to make it easier for others with the same issue to find it. thanks!
There are no any common practice for business process like you have. That depend of you and your client only.
You can use features conf or transfer. Can transfer to special extension or to conference room.
No way say what suite you better.
For sure you need understand how asterisk work before write any AGI/AMI or dialplan application. I can recommend ORelly's "Asterisk the future of telephony" book as start point.

SignalR and client data consistency

I'm about to implement a client check that warns if the data state is not as it should be. The server pushes data when it changes to the clients. Server always knows the current state. Is there anything in the SinglarR framework to help me write these checks? I guess it is necessary to write these checks (when using SignalrR and a push strategy) if consistency is important?
I'm thinking of adding a continous ID to all data entities send. Then both the client and server could hash the IDs and compare their state.
SignalR helps with the communication channel, but the data validation is up to your app to handle.
Also if you want to know when something changed, rather than just accepting an unchanged copy from the client, you would need to impose that check. You could use the .Observable along with RX along with .DistinctUntilChanged to protect for this case.

Spring-Flex BlazeDs Multi-User + Global Chat Messaging

I'm working on an application that allows users to send internal message to one-another.
I'll tell you what the current setup is and please help me figure out how to make it work or perhaps suggest another angle to take. We're using BlazeDS with Spring.
User A listens for messages on
message topic Chat.A
User B listens for messages on message topic Chat.B
Both users listen for global messages (system-wide messages) on topic Chat.System
So we have a multi-topic consumer for the personal message topic and one for the global message topic.
So a couple of questions I have:
Is it better to do it as two
distinct consumers (that share the
same handler function) or as one,
multi-topic consumer?
How do I check that the client A is actually the one listening to Chat.A and not just some one else that knows how to write BlazeDS clients? We have Spring Security in place, but how can I listen for subscription requests and block them if their user name (pulled from security context) doesn't match the sub-topic that they requested?
I've also read about selectors. Well, that looked promising, but again, how do I check that when a consumer uses selector="for == A || for == System that the consumer belongs to a client that has authenticated as that "for" user.
How do selectors compare/contrast to sub-topics? What's the best situation for each of them?
A selector is basically an expression you can use to filter which messages will be dispatched through your consumer. According to the docs, it uses SQL 92 conditional expression syntax:
http://livedocs.adobe.com/blazeds/1/blazeds_devguide/help.html?content=messaging_6.html
A subtopic is sort of a special case of a selector, filtering out messages whose "DSSubtopic" header don't match the provided value.
The important thing to understand with both of these is that the client determines which messages are sent to it, and as such it cannot be relied upon entirely for security.
To implement secure server-based filtering of messages based on an authenticated user's identity, see my answer to a related question here:
Flex Messaging Security
As far as multiple Consumers vs. MultiTopicConsumer, not sure there. They're both going to use the same underlying ChannelSet, so it ought not to have a big performance difference. I think it's mostly a question of whether it's convenient to have one event handler that responds to all messages from the MultiTopicConsumer or whether it's easier to have separate event handlers for each Consumer.
I usually use subtopics for this. But if you do it that way make sure that you disable subscriptions to wildcard subtopics.

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