Hi Ruth,

Your bank does not provide you with your own personal mainframe and your own
personal database. Your bank balance is in a row in a table with other
customers' balances above and below, which you should not be able to
discover. We've been living with those risks for decades.

Of course, an OFBiz user with permissions to log on to OFBiz and use its
services should not have the rights to modify a classpath or upload a Groovy
script. An OFBiz user should not have write permission on anything that is
executable. That applies to single-tenant as well as multi-tenant
situations. It applies to web applications in general, not just OFBiz, not
just Java. If such an exploit were ever found, I would be willing to bet
that a single-tenant OFBiz would be vulnerable as much as a multi-tenant
OFBiz.

Any OFBiz site that is public-facing (for example, for e-commerce) might
have visitors who are hostile to the owner and seeking to exploit a security
flaw to do damage. That applies to single-tenant as well as multi-tenant
situations.

Multi-tenancy should not greatly increase the risk of these or other
exploits. You're running pretty well the same code, it's just a matter of
what database you're connected to.

So I don't see multi-tenant as a totally new or unique situation. It's a
difference of degree, not kind. 

Cheers

Paul Foxworthy


Ruth Hoffman-2 wrote
> 
> Hans, Pierre and several others have been kind enough to outline the 
> OFBiz multi-tenant value proposition.
> 
> I appreciate this primarily because I can't even count the number of 
> times prospective OFBiz users have asked me about it. Now, with this 
> background information, I feel comfortable articulating the marketing 
> value proposition.
> 
> What I still have great angst about, is the security side of 
> multi-tenancy. Perhaps someone can clarify or answer this basic question:
> 
> What is to stop a hacker or otherwise malicious tenant from writing a 
> Groovy script (or Java program that is inserted on the classpath when 
> the system is rebooted) that acts as a "trojan horse"? For example, how 
> can you stop a savvy tenant from adding a program (or, I could even see 
> hacking the Mini-lang since all it is - is interpreted XML statements) 
> that monitors (JVM) memory and captures shopping cart objects or 
> usernames and passwords of the other tenants?
> 
> Really, I'd like to endorse multi-tenant implementations. But I am still 
> left with this one - very significant - security question.
> 
> Anyone care to respond? Am I missing something here?
> 
> Regards,
> Ruth Hoffman
> 

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