Security Checklist security-checklist

This section deals with various steps that you should take to ensure that your AEM installation is secure when deployed. The checklist is meant to be applied from top to bottom.

Main Security Measures main-security-measures

Run AEM in Production Ready Mode run-aem-in-production-ready-mode

For more information, see Running AEM in Production Ready Mode.

Enable HTTPS for transport layer security enable-https-for-transport-layer-security

Enabling the HTTPS transport layer on both author and publish instances is mandatory for having a secure instance.

Install Security Hotfixes install-security-hotfixes

Ensure that you have installed the latest Security Hotfixes provided by Adobe.

Change Default Passwords For the AEM and OSGi Console Admin Accounts change-default-passwords-for-the-aem-and-osgi-console-admin-accounts

Adobe recommends after installation that you change the password for the privileged AEM admin accounts (on all instances).

These accounts include:

These two accounts use separate credentials and having distinct, strong password for each is vital to a secure deployment.

Changing the AEM admin password changing-the-aem-admin-password

The password for the AEM admin account can be changed via the Granite Operations - Users console.

Here you can edit the admin account and change the password.

Importance of Changing the OSGi Web Console Password importance-of-changing-the-osgi-web-console-password

Aside from the AEM admin account, failing to change the default password for the OSGi web console password can lead to:

For more information on changing the web console password, see Changing the OSGi web console admin password below.

Changing the OSGi web console admin password changing-the-osgi-web-console-admin-password

Change the password used for accessing the Web console. Use an OSGI configuration to update the following properties of the Apache Felix OSGi Management Console:

To change the OSGi web console admin password:

Implement Custom Error Handler implement-custom-error-handler

Adobe recommends defining custom error handler pages, especially for 404 and 500 HTTP Response codes to prevent information disclosure.

Complete Dispatcher Security Checklist complete-dispatcher-security-checklist

AEM Dispatcher is a critical piece of your infrastructure. Adobe recommends that you complete the Dispatcher security checklist.

Verification Steps verification-steps

Configure replication and transport users configure-replication-and-transport-users

A standard installation of AEM specifies admin as the user for transport credentials within the default replication agents. Also, the admin user is used to source the replication on the author system.

For security considerations, both should be changed to reflect the particular use case at hand, with the following two aspects in mind:

Check the Operations Dashboard Security Health Checks check-the-operations-dashboard-security-health-checks

AEM 6 introduces the new Operations Dashboard, aimed at aiding system operators troubleshoot problems and monitor the health of an instance.

The dashboard also comes with a collection of security health checks. It is recommended you check the status of all the security health checks before going live with your production instance. For more information, consult the Operations Dashboard documentation.

Check if Example Content is Present check-if-example-content-is-present

All example content and users (for example, the Geometrixx project and its components) should be uninstalled and deleted completely on a productive system before making it publicly accessible.

See Work With Packages.

Check if the CRX development bundles are present check-if-the-crx-development-bundles-are-present

These development OSGi bundles should be uninstalled on both author and publish productive systems before making them accessible.

Check if the Sling development bundle is present check-if-the-sling-development-bundle-is-present

The AEM Developer Tools deploy the Apache Sling Tooling Support Install (org.apache.sling.tooling.support.install).

This OSGi bundle should be uninstalled on both author and publish productive systems before making them accessible.

Protect against Cross-Site Request Forgery protect-against-cross-site-request-forgery

The CSRF Protection Framework the-csrf-protection-framework

AEM 6.1 ships with a mechanism that helps protect against Cross-Site Request Forgery attacks, called the CSRF Protection Framework. For more information on how to use it, consult the documentation.

The Sling Referrer Filter the-sling-referrer-filter

To address known security issues with Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) in CRX WebDAV and Apache Sling, add configurations for the Referrer filter to use it.

The referrer filter service is an OSGi service that lets you configure the following:

To configure the referrer filter service:

OSGI Settings osgi-settings

Some OSGI settings are set by default to allow easier debugging of the application. Change such settings on your publish and author productive instances to avoid internal information leaking to the public.

For each of the following services, the specified settings must be changed:

See OSGi Configuration Settings.

When working with AEM, there are several methods of managing the configuration settings for such services; see Configuring OSGi for more details and the recommended practices.

Further Readings further-readings

Mitigate Denial of Service (DoS) Attacks mitigate-denial-of-service-dos-attacks

A denial of service (DoS) attack is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. This attack is often done by overloading the resource; for example:

There are many points of configuration for preventing such attacks, but only those points that relate to AEM are discussed here.

Configuring Sling to Prevent DoS

Sling is content-centric. Processing is focused on the content as each (HTTP) request is mapped onto content in the form of a JCR resource (a repository node):

See Sling Request Processing for more information.

This approach makes Sling powerful and flexible, but as always it is the flexibility that must be carefully managed.

To help prevent DoS misuse, you can do the following:

Mitigate Against DoS Caused by Using Form Selectors

Because AEM does not provide out-of-the-box indexes for the FormChooserServlet, using form selectors in queries can trigger a costly repository traversal, usually grinding the AEM instance to a halt. Form selectors can be detected by the presence of the *.form.* string in queries.

To mitigate this issue, you can do the following steps:

Mitigate Against DoS Caused by Asset Download Servlet

The default asset download servlet allows authenticated users to issue arbitrarily large, concurrent, download requests to create ZIP files of assets. Creating large ZIP archives can overload the server and the network. To mitigate a potential Denial of Service (DoS) risk caused by this behavior, AssetDownloadServlet OSGi component is disabled by default on Experience Manager publish instance. It is enabled on Experience Manager author instance by default.

If you do not need the download capability, disable the servlet on author and publish deployments. If your setup requires that the asset download capability is enabled, see this article for more information. Also, you can define a maximum download limit that your deployment can support.

Disable WebDAV disable-webdav

Disable WebDAV on both the author and publish environments by stopping the appropriate OSGi bundles.

Verify That You Are Not Disclosing Personally Identifiable Information In the Users Home Path verify-that-you-are-not-disclosing-personally-identifiable-information-in-the-users-home-path

It is important to protect your users by making sure that you do not expose any personally identifiable information in the repository users home path.

Since AEM 6.1, the way user (also known as authorizable) ID node names are stored is changed with a new implementation of the AuthorizableNodeName interface. The new interface no longer exposes the user ID in the node name but generates a random name instead.

No configuration must be performed to enable it, because it is now the default way of generating authorizable IDs in AEM.

Although not recommended, you can disable it in case you need the old implementation for backward compatibility with your existing applications. To do so, you must do the following:

Anonymous Permission Hardening Package anonymous-permission-hardening-package

By default, AEM stores system metadata, such as jcr:createdBy or jcr:lastModifiedBy as node properties, next to regular content, in the repository. Depending on the configuration and the access control setup, in some cases this could lead to exposure of personally identifiable information (PII), for example, when such nodes are rendered as raw JSON or XML.

Like all repository data, these properties are mediated by the Oak authorization stack. Access to them should be restricted in accordance with the principle of least privilege.

To support this, Adobe provides a permission hardening package as a basis for customers to build upon. It works by installing a “deny” access control entry at the repository root, restricting anonymous access to commonly used system properties. The package is available for download here and can be installed on all supported versions of AEM.

To illustrate the changes, we can compare the node properties that can be viewed anonymously before installing the package:

with the ones viewable after installing the package, where jcr:createdBy and jcr:lastModifiedBy are not visible:

For more information see the package release notes.

Prevent Clickjacking prevent-clickjacking

To prevent clickjacking, Adobe recommends that you configure your webserver to provide the X-FRAME-OPTIONS HTTP header set to SAMEORIGIN.

For more information on clickjacking, see the OWASP site.

Make Sure You Properly Replicate Encryption Keys When Needed make-sure-you-properly-replicate-encryption-keys-when-needed

Certain AEM features and authentication schemes require that you replicate your encryption keys across all AEM instances.

Before you do so, key replication is done differently between versions because the way keys are stored is different between 6.3 and older versions.

See below for more information.

Replicating Keys for AEM 6.3 replicating-keys-for-aem

Whereas in older versions the replication keys were stored in the repository, beginning with AEM 6.3 they are stored on the filesystem.

Therefore, to replicate your keys across instances, copy them from the source instance to the target instances’ location on the filesystem.

More specifically, you must do the following:

Replicating Keys for AEM 6.2 and Older Versions replicating-keys-for-aem-and-older-versions

In AEM 6.2 and older versions, the keys are stored in the repository under the /etc/key node.

The recommended way to securely replicate the keys across your instances is to only replicate this node. You can selectively replicate nodes via CRXDE Lite:

Perform a Penetration Test perform-a-penetration-test

Adobe recommends that you perform a penetration test of your AEM infrastructure before going on production.

Development Best Practices development-best-practices

It is critical that new development are following the Security Best Practices to ensure that your AEM environment stays safe.