Soledad

Synchronization Of Locally Encrypted Data Among Devices

Soledad is the part of LEAP that allows application data to be securely shared among devices. It provides, to other parts of the LEAP project, an API for data storage and sync.

This software is under development.

From version 0.9.7 on, soledad is a single package, with extra dependencies for the client and the server backends.

leap.soledad

Installing extra dependencies

The client backend is based on sqlcipher:

pip install ".[client]"

The server depends on CouchDB:

pip install ".[server]"

Compatibility

• Soledad Server >= 0.7.0 is incompatible with client < 0.7.0 because of modifications on encrypted document MAC calculation.
• Soledad Server >= 0.7.0 is incompatible with LEAP Platform < 0.6.1 because that platform version implements ephemeral tokens databases and Soledad Server needs to act accordingly.

Tests

System dependencies:

python3-venv

Install local dependencies:

$ cd testing
$ pyvenv test-env
$ source test-env/bin/activate
$ pip3 install -U -r requirements-testing.pip

Soledad tests use tox, and they live in the testing folder:

$ tox

Note that to run CouchDB tests, be sure you have CouchDB installed on your system.

Privileges

In order to prevent privilege escalation, Soledad should not be run as a database administrator. This implies the following side effects:

Database creation:

Can be done via a script located in pkg/server/create-user-db It reads a netrc file that should be placed on /etc/couchdb/couchdb-admin.netrc. That file holds the admin credentials in netrc format and should be accessible only by 'soledad-admin' user.

The debian package will do the following in order to automate this:

• create a user soledad-admin
• make this script available as create-user-db in /usr/bin
• grant restricted sudo access, that only enables user soledad to call this exact command via soledad-admin user.

The server side process, configured via /etc/soledad/soledad-server.conf, will then use a parameter called 'create_cmd' to know which command is used to allocate new databases. All steps of creation process is then handled automatically by the server, following the same logic as u1db server.

Database deletion:

No code at all handles this and privilege to do so needs to be removed as explained before. This can be automated via a simple cron job.