C* Audit - Nats.io Trigger for Elassandra & Cassandra

Cassandra audit trigger built with scala sbt project for nats.io messaging. This is particularly useful to implement auditing prior to Cassandra 4, and useful for creating other boilerplate triggers.

Getting Started with Scala SBT

• https://www.scala-sbt.org/1.x/docs/Setup.html

Prepare TLS (Required)

Everything at SFPL uses encryption by default (even testing). You can find docker images with encryption on by default (with test certificates below).

From the .setup/keys directory:

keytool -keystore nats-truststore.jks -alias CARoot -import -file rootCa.crt -storepass password -noprompt -storetype pkcs12
cat nats-client.key nats-client.crt > combined.pem
openssl pkcs12 -export -in combined.pem -out cert.p12
keytool -importkeystore -srckeystore cert.p12 -srcstoretype pkcs12 -deststoretype pkcs12 -destkeystore nats-keystore.jks
keytool -keystore nats-keystore.jks -alias CARoot -import -file rootCa.crt -storepass password -noprompt
rm cert.p12 combined.pem

Build & Deploy

Build jar file from this project(cstar-audit-nats-trigger.jar) and copy it to $CASSANDRA_HOME/triggers on every cassandra server, for example:

sbt assembly && \
sudo cp ./target/cstar-audit-nats-trigger-assembly-1.0.jar /etc/cassandra/triggers/

Then setup your config in /etc/cassandra/nats.conf:

nats {
  servers = "nats://localhost:4222"
  servers = ${?NATS_SERVERS}
  defaultTopic = "tic.log.audit"
  defaultTopic = ${?NATS_DEFAULT_TOPIC}
  keystorePath = "/etc/cassandra/nats-keystore.jks"
  keystorePath = ${?NATS_KEYSTORE_PATH}
  keystorePassword = "password"
  keystorePassword = ${?NATS_KEYSTORE_PASSWORD}
  truststorePath = "/etc/cassandra/nats-truststore.jks"
  truststorePath = ${?NATS_TRUSTSTORE_PATH}
  truststorePassword = "password"
  truststorePassword = ${?NATS_TRUSTSTORE_PASSWORD}  
}

Then run something like:

CREATE TRIGGER auditblobs
        ON cstartest.blobs
        USING 'io.sfpl.cstar.AuditNatsTrigger';

Then run an auditable event (we always use updater in our update queries so we know who's responsible). A simpler example:

INSERT INTO cstartest.blobs(id, payload) VALUES('001', 'dev');

And test:

cqlsh> SELECT * FROM cstartest.logs where params['__table'] = 'blobs' allow filtering;

Dependencies

By default we run encryption for all of our test services, so you can find default setups for use with the configuration & keys above using the following dependencies.

Nats

Nats is required for this example. Install by running:

docker-compose up

Or get a copy from https://hub.docker.com/repository/docker/sfproductlabs/nats

Elassandra (Optional)

We recommend elassandra for your workhorse database over cassandra. It provides realtime querying (elastic integration) with cassandra scalability (https://elassandra.readthedocs.io/en/latest/installation.html). We have our own docker image for testing here: https://hub.docker.com/repository/docker/sfproductlabs/elassandra

Tracker (Optional)

We use an in house GDPR compliant telemetry system called tracker. The schema for the default log entry, ends up in LOGS (https://github.com/sfproductlabs/tracker/blob/master/.setup/schema.2.cql).

Get a copy from https://hub.docker.com/repository/docker/sfproductlabs/tracker

Credits

https://gitlab.com/rahasak-labs/siddhi/-/tree/master/siddhi-trigger