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LEAP Web

The LEAP Web App provides the following functions:

  • User registration and management
  • Help tickets
  • Client certificate renewal
  • Webfinger access to user’s public keys
  • Email aliases and forwarding
  • Localized and Customizable documentation
  • Display of status updates from Twitter (access to tweets via Twitter API)

Written in: Ruby, Rails.

The Web App communicates with:

  • CouchDB is used for all data storage.
  • Web browsers of users accessing the user interface in order to edit their settings or fill out help tickets. Additionally, admins may delete users.
  • LEAP Clients access the web app’s REST API in order to register new users, authenticate existing ones, and renew client certificates.
  • tokens are stored upon successful authentication to allow the client to authenticate against other services

LEAP Web is provisioned and run as part of the overall LEAP platform.

Build Status

Original code specific to this web application is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License (version 3.0 or higher). See http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html for more information.

Documentation

For more information, see these files in the doc directory:

  • DEPLOY -- for notes on deployment.
  • DEVELOP -- for developer notes.
  • CUSTOM -- how to customize.
  • TWITTER_FEED -- how to use it.

External docs:

  • Overview of LEAP architecture - Bird's eye view of how all the pieces fit together.
  • Contributing - Contributing to LEAP software development.
    • Contributing to LEAP software development
    • How to issue a pull request
    • Overview of the main code repositories
    • Ideas for discrete, unclaimed development projects that would greatly benefit the LEAP ecosystem.

Installation

Typically, this application is installed automatically as part of the LEAP Platform. To install it manually for testing or development, follow these instructions:

Install system requirements

You'll need git, ruby (2.1.5), couchdb and bundler installed. On a recent debian based distribution run

sudo apt install git ruby couchdb bundler

For other operation systems please lookup the install instructions of these tools.

To run the tests you also need to be able to install the nokogiri gem. Nokogiri needs to be compiled during installation and thus has some more dependencies. On debian run:

sudo apt install build-essential patch ruby-dev zlib1g-dev liblzma-dev

On other systems you might have to look up instructions at http://www.nokogiri.org/tutorials/installing_nokogiri.html

Download source

We host our own git repository. In order to create a local clone run

git clone --recursive git://leap.se/leap_web
cd leap_web

The repo is mirrored on github and we accept pull requests there:

https://github.com/leapcode/leap_web

Install required ruby libraries

bundle

Typically, you run bundle as a normal user and it will ask you for a sudo password when it is time to install the required gems. If you don't have sudo, run bundle as root.

Installation for development purposes

Please see doc/DEVELOP.md for details about installing leap_web for development purposes.

Configuration for Production

The configuration file config/defaults.yml provides good defaults for most values. You can override these defaults by creating a file config/config.yml.

There are a few values you should make sure to modify:

production:
  admins: ["myusername","otherusername"]
  domain: example.net
  force_ssl: true
  secret_key_base: "e1c04f93edb26b64040ba49f34084b03abbc286a7fbb60b5b0736bed2d9fe3ec5f16ef4253b252080f3c8b52e11541d57adc8eee6e4bd53f3b568aced3455106"
  client_ca_key: "./test/files/ca.key"
  client_ca_cert: "./test/files/ca.key"
  ca_key_password: nil

  • admins is an array of usernames that are granted special admin privilege.

  • domain is your fully qualified domain name.

  • force_ssl, if set to true, will require secure cookies and turn on HSTS. Don't do this if you are using a self-signed server certificate.

  • secret_key_base, used for cookie security, you can create one with rake secret. Should be at least 64 bytes hex.

  • client_ca_key, the private key of the CA used to generate client certificates.

  • client_ca_cert, the public certificate the CA used to generate client certificates.

  • ca_key_password, used to unlock the client_ca_key, if needed.

Running

To run leap_web:

cd leap_web
bin/rake db:rotate
bin/rake db:migrate
bin/rails server

Then open http://localhost:3000 in your web browser.

When running in development mode, you can login with administrative powers by creating an account with username 'staff', 'blue', or 'red' (configured in config/default.yml).

To peruse the database, visit http://localhost:5984/_utils/

The task db:rotate must come before db:migrate, in order to assure that the special rotating databases get created.

Do not run the normal CouchRest task 'couchrest:migrate'. Instead, use 'db:rotate' since the latter will correctly use the couchdb.admin.yml file.

Testing

To run all tests

bin/rake RAILS_ENV=test db:rotate    # if not already run
bin/rake RAILS_ENV=test db:migrate   # if not already run
bin/rake test

To run an individual test:

rake test TEST=certs/test/unit/client_certificate_test.rb
or
ruby -Itest certs/test/unit/client_certificate_test.rb

Known problems

  • Client certificates are generated without a CSR. The problem is that this makes the web application extremely vulnerable to denial of service attacks. This is not an issue unless the provider enables the possibility of anonymously fetching a client certificate without authenticating first.

  • By its very nature, the user database is vulnerable to enumeration attacks. These are very hard to prevent, because our protocol is designed to allow query of a user database via proxy in order to provide network perspective.