2024-02-01 Meeting notes

@Craig McNally 

@Julian Ladisch 

@Axel Dörrer 

@Ryan Berger 

@Chris Rutledge 

@Jakub Skoczen 

@John Coburn 

@Skott Klebe 

CSP processes

Team

• We set the target release, even w/o approval.

• There are dedicated fields in Jira for tracking CSP approval, details, rejection comments, etc.  We will fill these in as approval is requested and approved/rejected

• There's a bunch of administrative overhead (test plans, rollback, etc.) required prior to requesting approval for CSP inclusion...  in some cases this paperwork is not yet ready, which is why we haven't requested CSP approval yet.

• If a Jira is specific to a single module, the responsible team's PO will request CSP approval

• If the Jira is cross-cutting/affects multiple modules, the Security Team will make the request (assuming it's security related!)

30 min

Anything Urgent? Review the Kanban board?

Team

• MODGQL-175: @John Coburn will open a PR to bump babel to version 7

Time permitting

Advice for handling of sensitive banking information

Team

From slack conversation, I think I've gathered the following:

• In this case (bank account and transit numbers), the information is highly sensitive.  

• Highly sensitive information should:

  • Be stored in it's own table

  • Accessed via a dedicated API

  • Protected by a dedicated permission

  • Encrypted in the database, not only on disk.  

    • This could mean either:

      • Explicitly encrypting/decrypting in the application layer and storing the encrypted data in postgres

      • Utilizing postgres extensions/modules to encypt certain columns, e.g. via pgcrypto (see https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/encryption-options.html)

Let's review and discuss before providing this feedback to Raman.

@Axel Dörrer also suggested that defining classes of sensitivity could help teams determine which techniques are applicable in various situations.  I agree having some general guidelines on this would be helpful.

• regular data

• low sensitive - permission based on same API

• high sensitive - permission based on dedicated API

It would probably help to provide concrete examples of data in each class.  This can be a longer term effort, we don't need to sort out all the details today.

• Next Steps:

  • Clearly define/formalize the various classes

    • Come up with concrete examples of each class

  • Build out guidance

    • Come up with concrete examples of how to protect each class of data.

  • Consider storing some classes of data outside of postgres altogether - e.g. in secret storage.

    • What would be the guidance we provide to teams for this so we don't end up with each team doing things differently?

    • SecretStore interface and existing implementations are currently only read-only.  They would need to be extended to allow for creation/mgmt of this information.

  • Craig to start a conversation in slack about this.

    • Seeking a volunteer to generate a draft document for us to review at a later meeting.

Today:

@Axel Dörrer to do a first draft as a base for further discussions

Status on pentesting works within Network traffic control group

@Axel Dörrer 

Due to some absences on different reasons the group stalled. Axel will try to reactivate the group.