Financial Management 11.1.2.4.101 still cannot be secured

I was hoping the recent wave of patches (.100 and .101) for HFM-- sorry, Oracle EPM Financial Management 11.1.2.4 would have started to address those well-known security problems that have been plaguing this (otherwise remarkable) release. Unfortunately, that is not the case.

To begin with, the server component is still looking for the wrong properties in registry ("isSSL" and "SSL_Port" rather than the actually existing "isSslEnabled" and "ssl_port"). This means that, whichever option you select in Configuration Utility, the component will default to ssl-disabled.

If we try to trick it, by manually adding the properties it's looking for, we get the following errors and the service shuts down:

[...] [FM] [ERROR] [] [oracle.FM.HSX.SERVER.oracle.epm.fm.hsxserver.HsxServer] [...] 
[SRC_CLASS: oracle.epm.fm.hsxserver.HsxServer] 
[SRC_METHOD: startThriftServices] An error occurred while starting HSX_SERVER_NAME service.[[

org.apache.thrift.transport.TTransportException: Either one of the KeyStore or TrustStore must be set for SSLTransportParameters

at org.apache.thrift.transport.TSSLTransportFactory.getServerSocket(TSSLTransportFactory.java:99)
at oracle.epm.fm.common.BaseSeviceManager.getSSLServerTransport(BaseSeviceManager.java:121)
at oracle.epm.fm.common.BaseSeviceManager.startService(BaseSeviceManager.java:68)
at oracle.epm.fm.hsxserver.HsxServer.startThriftServices(HsxServer.java:64)
at oracle.epm.fm.hsxserver.HsxServer.init(HsxServer.java:43)
at oracle.epm.fm.hsxserver.HsxServer.main(HsxServer.java:27)
]]

[...] An error occurred while starting HSX_SERVER_NAME service.[[
oracle.epm.fm.common.exception.HFMException: EPMHFM-66019: An error occurred while starting HSX_SERVER_NAME service.
at oracle.epm.fm.hsxserver.HsxServer.startThriftServices(HsxServer.java:70)
at oracle.epm.fm.hsxserver.HsxServer.init(HsxServer.java:43)
at oracle.epm.fm.hsxserver.HsxServer.main(HsxServer.java:27)
]]

As you can see, it complains about missing keystores. This was always a possibility, since we never got a chance to specify such a thing during configuration; however, most SSL-aware software usually ships with demo keys preconfigured for tests, so it was not unreasonable to expect HFM would do the same. No such luck!

Hopefully both problems will be comprehensively addressed sooner rather than later. As it is, secure 11.1.2.4 implementations still have to rely on both HFM web and app components running on a single box with a tight firewall, which is far from ideal.

Bonus: Peeking Under The Hood

These errors lift the veil on some of the development strategies Oracle employed to remove hard dependencies between HFM and Windows-specific DCOM.

It looks like they are using Apache Thrift, which can be roughly described as a serializer library to auto-generate network APIs for existing programs. They basically dropped DCOM network code and replaced it with a simpler network interface built on (if my speculation from the previous post is correct) some Weblogic subcomponent; this interface uses Thrift-generated serializations to pass data between appserver processes and the ADF-based web application.

In theory, such an approach could make it easier for third-party components to open connections directly to the HFM appserver, bypassing the need for specific client libraries (with their byzantine requirements) and just using Thrift to figure out necessary calls. However, I'm not really an expert in this field and I don't really know what this effort would entail; at this point, your best bet for custom integration is still likely to be the official HFM SDK.

OSX 10.11 El Capitan / Sierra and Kinesis Freestyle 2 Bluetooth little glitch

UPDATE 2017-04-25: this solution came in handy when I had another glitch with Sierra: keys would lag or repeat very erratically. Tried resetting pram etc to no avail, so then I performed these steps out of desperation and it all went back to normal.

After upgrading to El Capitan, my Kinesis Freestyle 2 Bluetooth keyboard had a small issue, which I'm documenting here in case other people hit it.

Basically, after installing the OS update, F*/special keys were dead. Solution:

1.  Open System Preferences -> Bluetooth
2. Click on the X icon to the right of the keyboard, in order to un-pair it.
3. turn the Kinesis off, then on again, and press the CONNECT button at the back of the keyboard
4. The keyboard should pop on the screen, select it and pair it again (you will have to type a few numbers shown on screen)

All done! You should now have your special keys back.

"Erase Free Space" on OSX to reclaim space

Being a heavy VMWare user, my laptop disk is always very close to being full. In a perennial search for space-saving tips, I've found a few sources mentioning the "Erase Free Space" command in Disk Utility could help reclaim a few GBs.

What is this command? Most operating systems "cheat" when deleting a file: they just mark sectors containing the file as free, without actually deleting any data. "Erase Free Space" is meant to actively write zeroes on all disk sectors reported as free, in order to actually erase content that might have been written to such sectors at some point in the past. It's a privacy / security feature, not supposed to reclaim space, but hey, it won't hurt to try! So I decided to give it a spin.

My experience was as follows:

1. Verified that I had 34 GB of free space (out of 500).
2. Launched Disk Utility selected the disk partition  i.e. the lowest "Macintosh HD" leaf item in tree menu.
3. Selected the Erase tab, clicked on Erase Free Space in the lower-left area. Because I have an SSD disk, I chose the "fastest" level: excessive wear should be avoided on SSD disks as much as possible, and I was not performing this operation for security reasons anyway so I didn't really care.
4. Observed disk free space dropping to zero in about a minute. Received message that disk is full (fair enough) and then another that Disk Utility failed to erase free space. Reported free space was now 34 GB again.
5. At this point, retrying the operation or going to First Aid -> Verify Permissions returned all sorts of errors about the disk being locked. One error was this: "This disk needs to be repaired using the Recovery HD. Restart your computer, holding down the Command key and the R key until you see the Apple logo. When the OS X Utilities window appears, choose Disk Utility."
6. I duly followed the procedure; however, when I launched Disk Utility in Recovery mode, almost everything was greyed out except "Verify Disk". This is because I use FileVault (i.e. total disk encryption) so the generic recovery utility, by design, has no access to the actual filesystem, which it sees as a single huge chunk of garbage data spanning the entire drive. It was a welcome surprise: it looks like this security feature actually works as it should.
7. I clicked Verify Disk where I could (on the top disk item) and it didn't report any problem. Closed Disk Utility and went to the Apple menu -> Restart.
8. After logon, all permissions-related commands in Disk Utility were usable again.
9. Most importantly, I now had 39 GB of free space.

Conclusion: it was a slightly scary experience, but got me back a nifty 5GB (or 1% of drive), so I guess I'll do it again in a couple of months.  I suspect the saving might actually be due to OSX reacting to a sudden lack of free space by flushing all the semi-permanent caches it can find; either that, or it forces some sort of defragmenting/fscheck routine at the following startup that results in a more optimized filesystem. To be honest I'm not terribly curious, I'm just happy I have another trick up my sleeve!

Slides for "The EPM Diet" presentation at Infratects TopGun 2015

I usually have a lot of fun at our Top Gun event, which is basically the only conference in Europe entirely dedicated to Hyperion/EPM infrastructure topics. Infratects being the leading player in the European space for this particular niche, it makes sense to get the community together and have honest conversations about best practices.

In 2014 I presented a talk about securing EPM. In 2015, in keeping with the tradition of telling people to do stuff they'd rather not, I talked about keeping servers fit by following an EPM diet, aka a number of little maintenance tasks to be periodically repeated.

I guess next year it will have to be about paying your taxes on time, or calling your mum every week.

Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) 11.1.2.4.0 cannot be fully secured

(If you don't know what HFM is or does, look away now!)

If you work in the Oracle EPM space, you know that the long-awaited version 11.1.2.4.0 has finally been released, without much fanfare. For HFM, this release marks a major turning point: core services have been deeply modified in order to make them run on Unix/Linux, and ASP.Net was entirely removed from the stack, so that HFM can be officially supported on Exalytics system running Oracle Linux.

HFM is built on the Microsoft C++ stack, so it was an arduous task to make it portable without throwing away a decade of development efforts. To Oracle's credit, the mission was basically accomplished; however, *nix shops will likely not be too eager to deploy 11.1.2.4.0 in production environments just yet -- nor will traditional HFM customers. This release is rough, with quite a few functional bugs (taskflows cannot be displayed; the interface does not fully work in IE11; and so on), and unfortunately security was another casualty.

If you enable SSL for internal communication between EPM components, all services should encrypt their network traffic. In order to do that, they have to be manually configured, installing identity certificates required by the SSL protocol; this is a standard operation in Weblogic, and documented for other components in the Security Configuration Guide. Unfortunately, the HFM application server:

1. is not a Weblogic instance (at least not officially -- will clarify this later)
2. is not documented in the Guide yet.

Straight out of the gate we have a problem -- what certificate will HFM use? Nevermind, let's assume there is one hardcoded somewhere (shock, horror!). We simply enable full-SSL in Common Settings:

Then activate SSL support in the HFM Application Server configuration task:

And we can see in the EPM Registry that these settings have gone in:

We then configure the rest of the stack to use SSL (which is quite trivial, these days), increase logging here and there (good practice when enabling SSL, since it helps with troubleshooting), restart our services and... it all works! Great! Hold on, what is this in the HFM log?

[2015-02-06T01:11:05.087+00:00] [FM] [ERROR] [EPMHFM-65559] [oracle.FM.HSSUTIL.oracle.epm.fm.hssservice.RegistryWrapper] [tid: 10] [ecid: 0000KhSSAzEEgKYjLpqIOA1Kp1Ib000000,0] [SRC_CLASS: oracle.epm.fm.hssservice.RegistryWrapper] [SRC_METHOD: getRegistryProperty] Invalid property isSSL for HIT Registry component app24. [2015-02-06T01:11:05.132+00:00] [FM] [WARNING] [] [oracle.FM.HSX.SERVER.oracle.epm.fm.hsxserver.service.HsxServerServiceManager] [tid: 10] [ecid: 0000KhSSAzEEgKYjLpqIOA1Kp1Ib000000,0] [SRC_CLASS: oracle.epm.fm.hsxserver.service.HsxServerServiceManager] [SRC_METHOD: init] An error occurred retrieving property isSSL from EPM registry, using default value :false. [2015-02-06T01:11:05.141+00:00] [FM] [ERROR] [EPMHFM-65559] [oracle.FM.HSSUTIL.oracle.epm.fm.hssservice.RegistryWrapper] [tid: 10] [ecid: 0000KhSSAzEEgKYjLpqIOA1Kp1Ib000000,0] [SRC_CLASS: oracle.epm.fm.hssservice.RegistryWrapper] [SRC_METHOD: getRegistryProperty] Invalid property SSL_Port for HIT Registry component app24. [2015-02-06T01:11:05.141+00:00] [FM] [WARNING] [] [oracle.FM.HSX.SERVER.oracle.epm.fm.hsxserver.service.HsxServerServiceManager] [tid: 10] [ecid: 0000KhSSAzEEgKYjLpqIOA1Kp1Ib000000,0] [SRC_CLASS: oracle.epm.fm.hsxserver.service.HsxServerServiceManager] [SRC_METHOD: init] An error occurred retrieving property SSL_Port from EPM registry, using default value :9092.[...] [SRC_METHOD: init] isSSLEnabled :false

Ouch, it looks like HFM is just ignoring our settings. Old-hat EPM infrastructure hackers at this point are probably thinking "Hold on, I know those 'not found' properties; they're usually seen on web-app nodes!" and that's exactly it. The HFM server fancies itself a web-app, and looks for web-app properties in its registry node; but that node is actually a custom non-standard type with non-standard properties "isSslEnabled" and "ssl_port" (lowercase).

To verify that HFM was not encrypting anything, I dusted off my miserable Wireshark skills and logged some network traffic.

As you can see in the screenshot, data originating from the HFM application server and using ports in the range used by HFM, are sending data down the wire completely unencrypted. Malicious actors could hide somewhere in your company network and silently siphon away all your precious financial data with minimal effort. If you care about security, you'll likely want to give this HFM release a wide berth, at least until this bug is fixed.

Bonus: The Strange Case of The Masqueraded Weblogic

As I mentioned above, the HFM application server is not officially a Weblogic instance. So why is it trying to look up registry properties typical of Weblogic instances? Maybe because it is, in fact, a bastardised Weblogic. If we look at the startup parameters configured in Windows Registry, we find the following:

What's that? A Weblogic parameter? Indeed it is. And why is it there? By default, Weblogic will use the cryptographic extensions found in the JDK (or JRockit) in which is running. By setting "nojce" to True, you can tell Weblogic to actually use its internal implementation of such extensions (which were probably developed by BEA back in the days, when crypto support in the JDK was a bit shaky). If you are bastardising weblogic, I guess you can also replace some of these classes with your custom versions, which is probably what Oracle was trying to do here.