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Application Layer

Authentication & configuration

Authenticate your application with Gremlin

In order to authenticate to Gremlin, you must provide the following configuration values to your application.

  • GREMLIN_ALFI_IDENTIFIER : A unique identifier for the application. This will be used to distinguish all of the application instances from one another
  • GREMLIN_TEAM_ID : The Team ID that this application belongs to. Only users in that team may conduct attacks on it.
  • GREMLIN_TEAM_CERTIFICATE_OR_FILE : Certificate for authenticating to Gremlin. See below for syntax on permissible values.
  • GREMLIN_TEAM_PRIVATE_KEY_OR_FILE : Private key for authenticating to Gremlin. See below for syntax on permissible values.

You may set these as environment variables or in a gremlin.properties file on the classpath. Certificates can be downloaded for each team from the Settings Page.

Examples

As a raw value

bash
1GREMLIN_TEAM_CERTIFICATE_OR_FILE=-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----...

Or pointing to a file

bash
1GREMLIN_TEAM_CERTIFICATE_OR_FILE=file:///usr/gremlin/certificate.pem

Optional configuration

The following keys may be set to tune how ALFI operates.

  • GREMLIN_ALFI_ENABLED : If set to anything other than true, all functionality is turned off. This is designed to give you the ability to safely deploy ALFI, knowing you've got a simple off-switch. When the functionality is off, no failures are ever injected by ALFI, no calls are made to the API, and no logging past configuration-time occurs.
  • GREMLIN_REFRESH_INTERVAL_MS : You may optionally provide this value to set the frequency with which the library will contact the Gremlin API. Minimum of 1000 (1 second), maximum of 300000 (5 minutes). Default of 10000 (10 seconds). This determines how quickly your application reacts to attacks being halted or created and the amount of network traffic generated by the library.
  • http_proxy : You may specify a proxy for traffic from the ALFI library back to the Gremlin control plane. This may optionally include basic auth.

Examples

  • GREMLIN_ALFI_ENABLED=true
  • GREMLIN_ALFI_IDENTIFIER=recommendation-service-i-0ab123456
  • GREMLIN_REFRESH_INTERVAL_MS=20000
  • http_proxy=http://proxy.server:3128
  • http_proxy=http://username:password@proxy.server:3128

Alternate configuration mechanism

As described above, the default configuration resolution mechanism is to use either properties defined in gremlin.properties, or in environment variables where your application runs. If those don't fit your needs, then you can provide an alternate mechanism by subclassing GremlinConfigurationResolver (javadocs) and supplying it to GremlinServiceFactory (javadocs) at construction-time.