Security Hardening

--- title: "Security Hardening" description: "Production security best practices for Aurora Enterprise deployments including network security, authentication, secrets management, rate limiting, and compliance." icon: "shield" ---

Overview

This guide covers security best practices for running Aurora Enterprise in production. Enterprise-specific features such as identity federation, audit immutability, and compliance controls provide additional hardening beyond OSS.

Network Security

• Deploy within a private VPC with no public exposure
• Use internal load balancers for inter-service communication
• Configure security groups to allow traffic only from trusted sources
• Enable TLS everywhere — use a reverse proxy (nginx, Envoy) for TLS termination
• For Kubernetes deployments, use the included PodSecurityContext and container SecurityContext (read-only root filesystem, non-root user, dropped capabilities)

Kubernetes Hardening

The Helm chart includes production security defaults:

podSecurityContext:
  runAsNonRoot: true
  runAsUser: 1000
  fsGroup: 1000

securityContext:
  allowPrivilegeEscalation: false
  readOnlyRootFilesystem: true
  runAsNonRoot: true
  runAsUser: 1000
  capabilities:
    drop:
      - ALL

Authentication

• Set a strong AURORA_MASTER_KEY for admin access (min 32 characters, alphanumeric + symbols)
• Use managed API keys with scoped permissions for application access
• Integrate with OIDC providers (Okta, Entra, any OpenID Connect provider) for user authentication
• Rotate keys and secrets regularly
• Use short-lived sessions — Enterprise identity uses 15-minute access tokens with 7-day refresh tokens

Enterprise Identity

identity:
  enabled: true
  jwt_secret: "${IDENTITY_JWT_SECRET}"
  admin_email: "admin@example.com"
  admin_password: "${IDENTITY_ADMIN_PASSWORD}"

The JWT secret must be at least 32 characters. Use environment variables or a secrets manager — never hardcode secrets in config files.

Secrets Management

• Never hardcode API keys in configuration files
• Use environment variables for local development: ${OPENAI_API_KEY}
• For production, use a secrets manager: AWS Secrets Manager, HashiCorp Vault, Azure Key Vault
• For Kubernetes, use existingSecret references instead of plaintext values in Helm values
• Enable OBSERVABILITY_EXPORTS_REDACT_HEADERS=true to strip sensitive headers from exported telemetry

YAML Placeholder Gotcha

If ${OPENAI_API_KEY} appears in YAML but the environment variable is not set, the literal string remains. Aurora detects ${ in credential fields and removes the provider entirely. Always verify env vars are exported before starting the process, or supply defaults: ${OPENAI_API_KEY:-}.

Rate Limiting

Configure rate limits to protect against abuse:

• Per-key rate limits via managed API keys
• Global rate limits at the proxy / load balancer level
• Budget enforcement for cost control
• Circuit breaker per provider to prevent cascading failures

resilience:
  circuit_breaker:
    failure_threshold: 5
    success_threshold: 2
    timeout: 30s

Compliance Controls

Enterprise adds compliance-specific security controls:

• Audit immutability — Prevent deletion or modification of audit records
• PII logging policy — Redact, hash, or block PII in log bodies
• Data residency — Declare and enforce data storage regions
• Evidence export — Periodic export of compliance evidence to secure storage

See Compliance for full configuration.

Monitoring and Alerting

• Enable Prometheus metrics for operational visibility
• Set up alerting on error rates, latency, and circuit breaker state
• Monitor cluster node heartbeats for node health
• Configure observability exports to send telemetry to your monitoring platform

Additional Hardening

• Logging — Enable audit logging for all configuration changes
• Updates — Keep Aurora updated to the latest version for security patches
• Dependency scanning — Regularly scan dependencies for vulnerabilities
• Access reviews — Use the access_review_cadence_days compliance setting to schedule regular access audits

Related

• Compliance — Compliance controls and evidence export
• Sizing and Redundancy — Production deployment sizing
• Cluster and HA — Multi-node cluster security