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Analytics

Why does LunaDefend need metrics?

We chose to make LunaDefend an open-source project because we believe that open-source is a requirement for production software. As a consequence of this, we are unable to collect metrics on usage as easily as a proprietary application would be able to (like a hosting SaaS product).

Our compromise for this was to create metrics that are published from a LunaDefend deployment by default. We have made an effort to make these metrics as low impact as possible in order to minimize the security impact of us collecting them. The metrics we collect are listed below. We have made this backend server publicly available for you to audit and review specifically because we wish to remain as transparent as possible about our collection of data and to earn your trust.

Disabling Metrics

As the developers of LunaDefend, we ask that you please leave metrics enabled unless you have a specific reason to do so. We have created LunaDefend and made it freely available for anybody to use, modify, and otherwise derive value from because we believe in open-source software. Leaving metrics sharing enabled is one of the easiest ways for you to give back and contribute to LunaDefend.

If you must disable metrics because of security reasons, or otherwise, and you would still like to give back to LunaDefend, then please consider contacting us about subscribing to our paid support plan. Paid support includes early access to security patches before we publish them to our open-source repo, as well as giving us the monetary means to continue building and supporting LunaDefend.

Should you wish to disable metrics collection, it may be disabled by setting:

module.exports = {
production: {
metrics: {
disabled: true
}
}
}

in your lunadefend.js config before LunaDefend is deployed. Setting this flag will disable deploying the Lambda that collects metrics every 24 hours.

Regardless, thank you for using LunaDefend and helping to improve the security of software across the world. We really appreciate it!

Metrics Collection Process Overview

Metrics are published from the Tokenizer to AWS CloudWatch by default.

Once per day (every 24 hours) a Lambda is triggered that reads the metrics data from CloudWatch and generates a summary of the metrics data. This data is an aggregate sum of the data from CloudWatch. That means that we don't collect information about the specific events like what data was Tokenized, when exactly the Tokenization occurred, or any other data related to your deployment that isn't listed below. We intentionally read the metrics data, add it all together, and then publish only the aggregate data.

We're an open-source data security company -- we're not Facebook. We don't want your data because your data does not make us any money. We only use this data to track our success over time and to help remind us why building LunaDefend is valuable for the world.

Metrics Collected:

  • Deployed Version
  • Number of Tokens Created
  • Number of Tokens Detokenized
  • Number of Grants Issued
  • Random Nonce (unique per deployment for us to track usage over time and to help us filter fraudulent data)

Example Metrics Request

This is an example JSON blob of what the metrics data actually looks like:

{
"version": "0.0.1",
"stack_id": "3d9c49ce-8367-43ec-8884-568c8d43faec",
"metrics": {
"tokenizeSuccess": 4,
"tokenizeFailure": 0,
"detokenizeSuccess": 2,
"detokenizeFailure": 0,
"createGrantSuccess": 2,
"createGrantFailure": 0
}
}

If you want to take a look at the exact data that's being submitted, you can review the JSON Schema validator. It's in the ./lib/apigateway-request-models.ts file.

Useful commands for dev

  • yarn run build compile typescript to js
  • yarn run watch watch for changes and compile
  • yarn run test perform the jest unit tests
  • cdk deploy deploy this stack to your default AWS account/region
  • cdk diff compare deployed stack with current state
  • cdk synth emits the synthesized CloudFormation template

Acknowledgements

This was built using the TypeScript AWS CDK. Thank you, Amazon, for letting us skip writing CloudFormation!

AWS Services used:

  • API Gateway (validates the request and then directly feeds it into the stream)
  • Kinesis Firehose (packs the data up into compressed blobs that are dumped into S3)
  • S3 (stored the compressed chunks of JSON in a way that can be queried, i.e. a basic data warehouse)
  • Athena (used to query the data in a SQL-like way)