Security Brief

Company

Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc
8 The Green
Suite #8383
Dover, DE 19901

https://discourse.org

Organizational Security

• Security policies are at: discourse/SECURITY.md - GitHub

• Company has over 100 employees, in more than a dozen different time zones. All work remotely from home. There is no “central office”

• We have had multiple third party security audits in the past, available on request. Our most recent audit can be found at discourse.org/forms/pen-test

Asset Classification

• Our colocated servers, which run all hosting services, are:

  • in the USA: Hurricane Electric in their Fremont, California data center and Equinix in their Seattle, Washington data center
  • in the EU: Equinix in their Dublin, Ireland data centre
  • in Canada: Equinix in their Toronto, Ontario data centre

• Our policy is to run the latest version of the operating system (macOS, Debian, Ubuntu, or Windows) with latest-up-to-date security patches, patching automatically through the built in update systems in each OS.

• All laptop systems that leave the home offices of our employees use full disk encryption, BitLocker on Windows, FileVault on macOS, or dm-crypt using LUKS on Linux

• All mobile devices are either iOS or Android, and have full-device encryption which is now standard on iOS and Android devices.

Personnel Security

• We have formal employment policies

• We have a formal security training program

Physical Security

• For our colocated servers, you can read about Hurricane Electric and Equinix’s physical security on their website

• All data is encrypted at rest

• We do not establish physical security policies for people’s homes, as all of our employees work from home

Environmental Security

• The main risk is our single data center in each geographic region other than the United States

• Our team is in many different timezones so risk of local disaster affecting employees is low

Network Security

• All access to our colocated servers is behind two firewalls:

  • the Hurricane Electric routers (in all locations) block all non-operational traffic
  • our Linux stateful firewalls

• SSH private keys are the responsibility of employees. Public keys are recorded in Git, so we can tell if they change

• We can invalidate any employee key on all servers in at most 20 minutes via Puppet

• All changes to operational control data are peer reviewed

• All customer database backups are encrypted at rest

• We do not store customer data on our local workstations unless required

  • situations where this is required must be approved by management and the data is removed from local workstations as soon as possible

• In addition to Rails and Nginx logs, we store all syslog data that any of our servers generate for at least 1 month when possible

• We do monthly automated security scans through Detectify; reports available on request

• We have a public vulnerability disclosure bounty program at HackerOne; you can browse all security related checkins in Discourse using this public search of our GitHub open source code: https://github.com/discourse/discourse/search?q=SECURITY&type=Commits

• Our HTTPS hosting gets an A+ SSL rating from ssllabs.com, see the most recent result to verify.

Incident Response

• Our SLA is 99-99.9% uptime (depending on hosting tier)

• We have a private email address for urgent Enterprise customer support

• We monitor our own systems internally for outages, as well as external monitoring services for public HTTP/HTTPS

• Unacknowledged alerts are escalated to on-call team members in a follow-the-sun manner

• All our monitoring tools report to our online chat system, which as a remote team in different timezones has excellent throughout-the-day coverage as this is the primary way we communicate with each other

• We have formal incident response and resolution policies

Access Control

• All access to our colocated servers is through SSH jump boxes

• Password authentication is disabled on all servers. Per-user SSH keypairs are required to access any server. You then need an additional per-user password to get root.

• Elevated privileges are granted to team members with a legitimate need for them for the purposes of support or system maintenance.

• Physical access to Hurricane Electric or Equinix colocation facilities requires government ID and being on the “approved” access list for our account

System & Information Integrity

• Our hosting is redundant on multiple colocated servers for database, web, and routing

• The loss of any individual server will not cause an outage

• All our co-located physical servers have mirrored drive arrays for redundancy

• We ship encrypted customer data to Amazon S3 twice daily for secure offsite backup

• Our S3 encrypted backup keys are stored in private Git repositories on our physical servers

Confidentiality

• Our privacy policy is linked from our website footer at https://www.discourse.org/privacy

Compliance

• We maintain SOC 2 Type 2 accreditation. Our current report is available at discourse.org/forms/soc2.
• We maintain ISO 27001:2013 certification. Our current certificate is available at discourse.org/forms/iso27001.

System Development and Maintenance

• All employee GitHub accounts have two-factor authentication enforced

• Our security policy is at https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/docs/SECURITY.md

• Our code is 100% open source and freely auditable at https://github.com/discourse/discourse

• Developers have a complete local setup for all code so they can work and test using dummy data (no customer data is used locally)

• We have a large set of “unit tests” that validates code changes do not break functionality, and is run after every checkin

• We have a “smoke test” that validates our code does not prevent essential functionality in a headless web browser, and is run after every checkin

• We continuously deploy all checkins to meta.discourse.org as soon as our automated testing passes for team and public testing

• If code is stable on meta.discourse.org for a period of days, we deploy it to a few low-volume hosted customers; If code is stable on low-volume customers, we deploy it to a few high-volume hosted customers; If code is stable on high-volume customers, we deploy it to all hosted customers

• Our general software methodology is documented here How do we decide what goes into each release of Discourse? - Discourse Meta

Business Continuity Planning

• All our code is hosted by GitHub, most of it is public and therefore mirrored multiple places and recoverable in the event of disaster

• Internal operational data is also backed up to AWS S3 and encrypted at rest

• We have a built in disaster recovery test that pulls down a random customer backup from Amazon S3 and restores it as a functioning Discourse instance. This test executes daily

This version of CDCK’s security brief took effect July 3, 2024.