We now live in an era where the security of all layers of the software stack is immensely important, and simply open-sourcing a code base is not enough to ensure that security vulnerabilities surface and are addressed. At Teleport, we see it as a necessity to engage a third party that specializes in acting as an adversary, and provide an independent analysis of our sources.

Databases are the Holy Grail for hackers, and as such, must be protected with utmost care. This is the first in a series of articles in which we’ll give an overview of best practices for securing your databases. We’re starting with one of the most popular open-source databases, PostgreSQL, and will go over several levels of security you’d need to think about.

Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) is an attack that can be used to make your application issue arbitrary HTTP requests. SSRF is used by attackers to proxy requests from services exposed on the internet to un-exposed internal endpoints. SSRF is a hacker reverse proxy. These arbitrary requests often target internal network endpoints to perform anything from reconnaissance to complete account takeover.