An apicast module that logs API requests and responses for non-repudiation purposes

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An Apicast module that logs API requests and responses

Description

This project is an Apicast module that logs API requests and responses for non-repudiation purposes.

How it works

This Apicast module intercepts API requests and sends them to a syslog server. The request, response, headers and additional information are serialized as JSON and sent to a syslog server.

Pre-requisites

This projects requires :

an Apicast gateway
a syslog server (such as rsyslog)
the lua-resty-logger-socket module

This project has been tested with Apicast v3.2. It may work with newer or older version but it may require some minor changes.

Installation

If not already done, start your syslog server and configure it to listen for TCP connections on port 1601. An exemple is given below with the rsyslog daemon included in RHEL7 / CentOS7):

oc new-app https://github.com/nmasse-itix/OpenShift-Docker-Images.git --context-dir rsyslog --name rsyslog
oc volume dc rsyslog --add --overwrite --name=rsyslog-volume-1 -t pvc --claim-size=512Mi --claim-name=rsyslog-data --mount-path=/var/log/

Then, update your apicast-staging to embed the required code, module and environment variables as explained:

Put resolver.conf in /opt/app-root/src/apicast.d/resolver.conf:

oc create configmap apicast.d --from-file=resolver.conf
oc volume dc/apicast-staging --add --name=apicastd --mount-path /opt/app-root/src/apicast.d/ --type=configmap --configmap-name=apicast.d

Put the lua-resty-logger-socket module in /opt/app-root/src/src/resty/logger/:

git clone https://github.com/cloudflare/lua-resty-logger-socket.git
oc create configmap lua-resty-logger-socket --from-file=lua-resty-logger-socket/lib/resty/logger/socket.lua
oc volume dc/apicast-staging --add --name=lua-resty-logger-socket --mount-path /opt/app-root/src/src/resty/logger/ --type=configmap --configmap-name=lua-resty-logger-socket

Put the verbose.lua module in /opt/app-root/src/src/custom/:

oc create configmap apicast-custom-module --from-file=verbose.lua
oc volume dc/apicast-staging --add --name=apicast-custom-module --mount-path /opt/app-root/src/src/custom/ --type=configmap --configmap-name=apicast-custom-module

Set the configuration required by verbose.lua as environment variables and re-deploy apicast:

oc env dc/apicast-staging APICAST_MODULE=custom/verbose
oc env dc/apicast-staging SYSLOG_PROTOCOL=tcp
oc env dc/apicast-staging SYSLOG_PORT=1601
oc env dc/apicast-staging SYSLOG_HOST=rsyslog.3scale.svc.cluster.local
oc rollout latest apicast-staging

NOTE: You need to adjust the value of SYSLOG_HOST to match your environment. Namely, make sure you are using a FQDN that resolves to your syslog server. If the syslog server is deployed in OpenShift, it needs to be in the same project as the apicast (of course, unless you are using a flat network...).

In an OpenShift environment, the SYSLOG_HOST would look like:

<service-name>.<project>.svc.cluster.local

WARNING: You cannot use a short name (ie rsyslog). It has to be a FQDN. This is because nginx does not rely on the standard glibc API gethostbyname but uses instead a custom resolver.

Once, you get it to work on apicast-staging, you can do the same on apicast-production.

Performances

The following section tries to evaluate the overhead of this module on apicast performances.

Performance tests have been run on a vanilla apicast 3.0 and an apicast with this module. Both tests have been run with 1k requests and responses and 10k requests and responses.

All tests have been performed on the same hardware :

Macbook Pro 15" Mid-2015
2,5 GHz Intel Core i7 (8 cores)
16 GB of RAM

All components apicast + rsyslog ran on the same machine, directly on MacOS. All external systems (3scale backend, Echo API) have been simulated using the apicast built-in stubs.

More information is available here.

The results are the following:

test	req / s	overhead
1K Request + Response - Vanilla	7692	-
1K Request + Response - with this module	5882	- 23%
10K Request + Response - Vanilla	6250	-
10K Request + Response - with this module	3174	- 49%

The results are not very surprising considering that the module needs to:

read the full body of the request and the response
encode them as base64
serialize the whole data as JSON

TODO: run performance tests to analyze the added latency

Message format

The requests and responses are serialized as follow:

{
  "request": {
    "request_id": "3b1b0d[...]",           // The unique ID of the request
    "raw": "R0VUIC8/dXN[...]",             // The raw request (request line + headers), base64 encoded
    "headers": {                           // The request headers as an object
      "host": "echo-api.3scale.net",
      "accept": "*/*",
      "user-agent": "curl/7.54.0"
    },
    "body": "3b1b0d587[...]",              // The body of the request, base64 encoded
    "method": "GET",                       // HTTP Method
    "start_time": 1503929520.684,          // The time at which the request has been received
    "uri_args": {                          // The decoded querystring as an object
      "foo": "bar"
    },
    "http_version": 1.1                    // The version of the HTTP protocol used to submit the request
  },
  "response": {
    "headers": {                           // The response headers as an object
      "cache-control": "private",
      "content-type": "application/json",
      "x-content-type-options": "nosniff",
      "connection": "keep-alive",
      "content-length": "715",
      "vary": "Origin"
    },
    "body": "ewogICJtZXRob2Qi[...]",       // The body of the response, base64 encoded
    "status": 200                          // The HTTP Status Code
  },
  "upstream": {                            // See http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_upstream_module.html#variables
    "response_length": "715",
    "header_time": "0.352",                             
    "addr": "107.21.49.219:443",
    "response_time": "0.352",
    "status": "200",
    "connect_time": "0.261"
  },
}

Configuration

The following excerpt shows a sample configuration for this module, when used as a service policy.

{
  "services":[
    {
      "id":42,
      "proxy":{
        "policy_chain":[
          {
            "name":"custom.logger.verbose",       // the verbose policy that lays in the ./gateway/custom/logger/ directory
            "configuration": {
              "syslog_host": "syslog.acme.test",  // the hostname of the syslog server
              "syslog_port": 1601,                // the port of the syslog server
              "syslog_protocol": "tcp",           // the protocol to use to connect to the syslog server (tcp or udp)
              "syslog_flush_limit": "0",          // the minimum number of bytes in the buffer before sending logs to the syslog server
              "syslog_drop_limit": "1048576",     // the maximum number of bytes in the buffer before starting to drop messages
              "syslog_periodic_flush": "5",       // the number of seconds between each log flush (0 to disable)
              "payload_encoding": "base64"        // the algorithm used to encode the payload ('base64' or 'none')
            }
          },
          {
            "name":"apicast.policy.apicast"       // also keep the default apicast behavior
          }
        ]
      }
    }
  ]
}

Development

First of all, setup your development environment as explained here.

Then, issue the following commands:

git clone https://github.com/nmasse-itix/apicast-logger.git
git clone https://github.com/3scale/apicast.git
git clone https://github.com/cloudflare/lua-resty-logger-socket.git
export GIT_ROOT=$PWD
cd apicast
luarocks make apicast/*.rockspec --local
mkdir gateway/src/custom
ln -s $GIT_ROOT/apicast-logger/ gateway/src/custom/logger/
cd gateway/src/resty
ln -s $GIT_ROOT/lua-resty-logger-socket/lib/resty/logger/ logger
cd -

Configure your apicast with a local configuration:

export THREESCALE_CONFIG_FILE=$GIT_ROOT/apicast-logger/config.json
export APICAST_LOG_LEVEL=debug

Finally, launch apicast:

bin/apicast --dev

And in another terminal, launch netcat so that you can simulate a syslog server:

nc -l 1601

References

The following reading is recommended if you plan to develop on this module:

How to develop policies for Apicast

Troubleshooting

When troubleshooting, keep in mind that the underlying lua-resty-logger-socket module is asynchronous. When the logs cannot be sent to the syslog server, the error is caught ONLY UPON THE NEXT REQUESTS. So, you might have to send a couple requests before seeing errors in the logs.

If you need to troubleshoot DNS issue :

dig rsyslog.3scale.svc.cluster.local
dig -p5353 @127.0.0.1 rsyslog.3scale.svc.cluster.local

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