Security and the Issue Collector plugin

Dave Drexler May 6, 2012

hi folks - When I suggested using the Issue Collector plugin to collect feedback from users of our website, our IT staff brought up a good point: opening a hole in our firewall to let Issue Collector submissions through seems awfully costly.

Now, Jira is safely within our firewall, and we don't need to worry about security. As soon as we open Jira to the outside world, we have to start really paying attention to patches and risk mitigation. It's not a huge deal of course, but it's also not the low-cost or no-cost solution that I thought it was at first.

Does anyone have a suggestion as to how this could be set up, with a small impact on our expensive IT staff?

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JamieA
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May 7, 2012

It is a big deal and I think you're right to be worrying about it. I'm not sure there are any shortcuts... although there are plenty of public jira instances out there, but you will need to be careful about patching, making sure anonymous access is denied etc. Also don't forget the issue collector is "beta" - you would not want any failures on your public facing website.

Dave Drexler May 7, 2012

I just posted a question to Atlassian Sales, asking if we can use a small OnDemand account (10 users) to harvest the tickets. I'm imagining that we could then use Notification emails to send the tickets on to our internal instance.

JamieA
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May 7, 2012

I'm sure that would be fine, if you specify in the issue collector that the reporter is a always the same user.

One other thing that I consider a potential security issue, is that the issue collector allows matching an email address provided with a jira user, and then entering the issue as that user. I think this is a bit iffy... someone could provide the email of a jira admin, create an issue with some malicious attachment. When people view the issue their guard might be down because it looks like the issue was created by a known and trusted individual, so they open the attachment.

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Dave Drexler May 7, 2012

Another good idea! Thanks for your help, Jamie!

Dave Drexler May 7, 2012

Good point. I think, if we do this, I would hard-wire the Collector to use a specific user, and restrict that user to only the bare minimum rights to get the ticket recorded.

JamieA
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May 7, 2012

When an issue is created it displays a link to the issue. Would probably be better if you removed that, and just replaced with a "thanks for giving feedback" type message.

JamieA
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May 7, 2012

No worries... feel free to mark my answer as correct / vote it up / both ;-)

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