Message encryption

[sagikazarmark]

In some cases it exposes a security issue if the messages in a queue are not encrypted, thus can be read by a human.

Is it possible to implement encryption? Not meaning having it in the core, but having the possibility to implement it. Any ideas?

[henrikbjorn]

Yes

This is on the roadmap, i am working on writing a specification for the message format which is based on HTTP Messages, where headers arent encoded but can define encryption, serialization format etc.

[sagikazarmark]

Sounds like a great feature

[lakiboy]

@sagikazarmark You can encrypt messages by doing something like this:

Producer:

    public function collect(Foo $foo)
    {
        $message = new DefaultMessage($this->queueName);
        $message->data = serialize($foo);
        $message->encrypted = false;

        if ($this->encrypter !== null) {
            $message->encrypted = true;
            $message->data = $this->encrypter->encrypt($message->data);
        }

        $this->bernard->produce($message, $this->queueName);
    }

Consumer:

    public function __invoke(DefaultMessage $message)
    {
        $data = $message->data;

        if ($message->encrypted) {
            if ($this->encrypter === null) {
                throw new \RuntimeException('Can not decrypt message. Encrypter is not configured.');
            }

            $data = $this->encrypter->decrypt($data);
        }

        /** @var Foo $foo */
        $foo = unserialize($data);

        // Do something with $foo
    }

As an encrypter you could use https://github.com/nelmio/NelmioSecurityBundle/blob/master/Encrypter.php

We use this approach to collect some sensitive data in front-end application for post process in backend application. Just need to make sure the secret is the same for both apps.

[sagikazarmark]

Yeah, it could definitely work. But it seems a bit hacky. What I am thinking about is to have a custom serializer which encrypts the serialized message itself. The benefit is that you can encrypt any kinds of message with it.

[lakiboy]

It sounded like you need a solution ASAP, hence I provided a hint. Custom normalizer is cleaner, of course, but I guess you need to wrap your message with EncryptedMessage class for normalizer to pick it up.

[sagikazarmark]

@lakiboy thank you very much, but it is not so urgent.

Actually, you can create a normalizer which wraps around the "usual" normalizer so that you can encrypt any messages.

[Baachi]

Why not just extend the DefaultMessage and overwrite get/set methods?

[sagikazarmark]

I think message encryption should be universal. Every message is normalized into string at some point. So why not an encryption layer after that point? It is simple, universal.

[Baachi]

@sagikazarmark Thats the best/optimal solution, may solution was more the easy way. If you want to setup on this point, i would think the best position is to extend the Serializer. He serialize any envelope/message to a string, so i think this is the best point to startup.

[henrikbjorn]

Unfortunately i have not had much time for my OSS projects because of an alarming close deadline at work.

As @Baachi meantions i think extending the Serializer is a good idea. Could even be done through composition.

[sagikazarmark]

Probably yes. But as I know @henrikbjorn plans some sort of message format RFC and I think encryption could be an extension of that.

[sagikazarmark]

So basically we have two propsals:

• Have some kind of encryption on the driver level (after serialization happens)
• Handle encryption on the serialization layer

[holtkamp]

@sagikazarmark did you have any progress on this? What option worked out best?

Note that when the SQSDriver is used, Amazon AWS SQS now supports server-side encryption, which might be an alternative...

[henrikbjorn]

I once had the idea of doing something like having a message consist of headers and a body, where the headers would indicate encryption, type of body etc etc. kinda like a http message and i guess that is kind of what Rabbit does also.