markofu’s blog

Receiving mails via LinkedIn is an interesting experience. For example, how many folk actually personalise "contact requests" - from what I see, less than 1%. I typically try to because I think it shows some thought has gone into the request and it's friendly, but then "manners" on the Internet is a very different thing to the real world, right ;-) Anyway, to the point of the blog post. In early November (2012), whilst I was preparing my Security Onion presentation for IrissCon  (why did I bother when my MBP died on-stage), I received a very interesting and personal email via LinkedIn. The email came from a "Senior International Belief Instigator" (let's call him the SIBI - to save me typing) at Riot Games and the email was literally awesome, it hit many of the key points that you'd hope for in a recruiter email but it also had a wonderful tone. In my ignorance, I knew of League of Legends but not Riot (yes, I am embarrassed by that). I r...

Introduction Having answered numerous questions on the new and old authori(s|z)ation within MongoDB, I thought I'd write a short blog post explaining how things work as there seems to be some confusion. What's New Prior to version 2.4 , there was a very basic sense of "Role Based Access Controls" (RBAC) within MongoDB as there were only two roles - read readWrite which is quite limited. For example, if the user has "readWrite", that user is essentially "root" and the user can add/remove users as well as inserting data into the database, i.e. there is no role segregation. Version 2.4 added in the following 3 core roles - userAdmin dbAdmin clusterAdmin with a notable extension such that there are now 4 roles that apply across all databases - readAnyDatabase readWriteAnyDatabase userAdminAnyDatabase dbAdminAnyDatabase This increased RBAC is a significant improvement from a security perspective in MongoDB. It is imp...