Tech note - user configuration and security best practices update

25th July 2024

As part of security best practices, Matillion will be deprecating the None authentication functionality, as described in User configuration.

Note

We will update this tech note with the deprecation date of None and the versions of Matillion ETL that include this deprecation.

This configuration option had only ever been in place to enable initial testing and configuration. Its presence makes it too easy to accidentally configure insecure defaults. We recommend that all users should configure (at least) internal security instead, and should consider single sign-on methods such as OpenID or LDAP if available in your internal infrastructure.

The use of internal or external security configurations on high availability (HA) clusters will require enabling stateless authentication as well. This will require an external Postgres database to be configured. We recommend that all customers configure external Postgres for data security and flexibility in maintenance and upgrades.

To prevent unauthorized access to this database, firewall and/or VPC rules should be in place, such that only the default Postgres port :5432 is open, and the machines that are expected to access that database, which will be the Matillion ETL nodes and any designated database maintenance host, are able to access it.

If you are using a load balancer to distribute connections between HA nodes, then it is also preferable to only allow HTTPS connections to the nodes from the load balancer, and SSH connections from within your own company network. The load balancer should only accept HTTPS connections from within your own network.