24.1. Securing access to the Neo4j Server

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24.1.1. Secure the port and remote client connection accepts
24.1.2. Server Authorization Rules
24.1.3. Hosted Scripting
24.1.4. Security in Depth
24.1.5. Rewriting URLs with a Proxy installation

24.1.1. Secure the port and remote client connection accepts

By default, the Neo4j Server is bundled with a Web server that binds to host localhost on port 7474, answering only requests from the local machine.

This is configured in the conf/neo4j-server.properties file:

# http port (for all data, administrative, and UI access)
org.neo4j.server.webserver.port=7474

#let the webserver only listen on the specified IP. Default
#is localhost (only accept local connections). Uncomment to allow
#any connection.
#org.neo4j.server.webserver.address=0.0.0.0

If you need to enable access from external hosts, configure the Web server in the conf/neo4j-server.properties by setting the property org.neo4j.server.webserver.address=0.0.0.0 to enable access from any host.

24.1.2. Server Authorization Rules

Administrators may require more fine-grained security policies in addition to IP-level restrictions on the Web server. Neo4j server supports administrators in allowing or disallowing access the specific aspects of the database based on credentials that users or applications provide.

To facilitate domain-specific authorization policies in Neo4j Server, SecurityRules can be implemented and registered with the server. This makes scenarios like user and role based security and authentication against external lookup services possible.

Enforcing Server Authorization Rules

In this example, a (dummy) failing security rule is registered to deny access to all URIs to the server by listing the rules class in neo4j-server.properties:

org.neo4j.server.rest.security_rules=my.rules.PermanentlyFailingSecurityRule

with the rule source code of:

public class PermanentlyFailingSecurityRule implements SecurityRule
{

    public static final String REALM = "WallyWorld"; // as per RFC2617 :-)

    @Override
    public boolean isAuthorized( HttpServletRequest request )
    {
        return false; // always fails - a production implementation performs
                      // deployment-specific authorization logic here
    }

    @Override
    public String forUriPath()
    {
        return SecurityRule.DEFAULT_DATABASE_PATH;
    }

    @Override
    public String wwwAuthenticateHeader()
    {
        return SecurityFilter.basicAuthenticationResponse(REALM);
    }
}

With this rule registered, any access to the server will be denied. In a production-quality implementation the rule will likely lookup credentials/claims in a 3rd party directory service (e.g. LDAP) or in a local database of authorized users.

Example request

POST http://localhost:7474/db/data/node
Accept: application/json

Example response

401: Unauthorized
WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="WallyWorld"

24.1.3. Hosted Scripting

	Important
	The neo4j server exposes remote scripting functionality by default that allow full access to the underlying system. Exposing your server without implementing a security layer poses a substantial security vulnerability.

24.1.4. Security in Depth

Although the Neo4j server has a number of security features built-in (see the above chapters), for sensitive deployments it is often sensible to front against the outside world it with a proxy like Apache mod_proxy ^[3]. This provides a number of advantages:

Control access to the Neo4j server to specific IP addresses, URL patterns and IP ranges. This can be used to make for instance only the /db/data namespace accessible to non-local clients, while the /db/admin URLs only respond to a specific IP address.
```
<Proxy *>
  Order Deny,Allow
  Deny from all
  Allow from 192.168.0
</Proxy>
```

While equivalent functionality can be implemented with Neo4j’s SecurityRule plugins (see above), for operations professionals configuring servers like Apache is often preferable to developing plugins. However it should be noted that where both approaches are used, they will work harmoniously providing the behavior is consistent across proxy server and SecurityRule plugins.

Run Neo4j Server as a non-root user on a Linux/Unix system on a port < 1000 (e.g. port 80) using

ProxyPass /neo4jdb/data http://localhost:7474/db/data
ProxyPassReverse /neo4jdb/data http://localhost:7474/db/data

Simple load balancing in a clustered environment to load-balance read load using the Apache mod_proxy_balancer ^[4] plugin

<Proxy balancer://mycluster>
BalancerMember http://192.168.1.50:80
BalancerMember http://192.168.1.51:80
</Proxy>
ProxyPass /test balancer://mycluster

24.1.5. Rewriting URLs with a Proxy installation

When installing Neo4j Server behind proxies, you need to enable rewriting of the JSON calls, otherwise they will point back to the servers own base URL (normally http://localhost:7474).

To do this, you can use Apache mod_substitute

ProxyPass / http://localhost:7474/
ProxyPassReverse / http://localhost:7474/
<Location />
    AddOutputFilterByType SUBSTITUTE application/json
    AddOutputFilterByType SUBSTITUTE text/html
    Substitute s/localhost:7474/myproxy.example.com/n
    Substitute s/http/https/n
</Location>

^[3]http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_proxy.html

^[4]http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_proxy_balancer.html