What are the best practices for hosting Tezos nodes with exposed RPCs?

Question

If i host my own node, e.g. like TezBox does, what's the best practice regarding accessibility of certain RPC endpoints?

TzScan already restricts certain calls, as described here.

Tezos docs advise as following:

The RPC interface must be enabled in order for the clients to communicate with the node, but is should not be publicly accessible on the internet.

With the new memory management update, additional RPC endpoints will be available, and they might posses a danger if exposed publicly without knowing.

Answer 1

Either:

• don't expose the RPC at all (!), or
• put a proxy in front with a maximally restrictive whitelist.

Of course, for a whitelist to help, you must not include potentially harmful endpoints in your whitelist... Even seemingly harmless endpoints might be used for denial of service, and some endpoints are surprisingly harmful.

Answer 2

What we do for TezRPC (which powers TezBox) is run a proxy on each server. Within this proxy, you can then block, restrict and customize public facing endpoints.

We currently use a light proxy built with NodeJS, but will switch over to a nginx style proxy (better performance).

Here is an example of a node.js proxy that blocks almost all endpoints (listening to the local RPC API on port 8732):

var express = require('express');  
var request = require('request');
var app = express();  
var cors = require('cors')
var apiServerHost = "http://localhost:8732";
app.use(cors())
app.use('/', function(req, res) {
    // Whitelist. Be afraid.
    if (req.url === '/chains/main/blocks/head'
          || req.url === '/chains/main/blocks/head/hash') {
        var url = apiServerHost + req.url;
        req.pipe(request(url)).pipe(res);
    } else {
        res.status(404).send('Not available');
    }
});
app.listen(process.env.PORT || 3000, function () {
  console.log('TZProxy running')
})  

Answer 3

One of the alternatives i could think of, is using Conseil: https://github.com/Cryptonomic/Conseil

In my humble understanding what Conseil does, is provide an extended API on top of a tezos-node/rpc. And perhaps (?) some extra features which could allow enabling/disabling endpoints or other security measures.

Here's a few examples

Answer 4

When you only need the RPC for yourself you could also use ssh local port forwarding to forward the RPC from the localhost of your remote machine to the localhost of your local machine.

For instance, as a background process:

ssh -fNT -L 8732:localhost:8732 user@hostname

I don't know how safe this is though.

Answer 5

This medium post: Deploy Scalable Tezos Nodes in the Cloud presents a method to deploy a RPC service on AWS using Pulumi and tezos-k8s.