Truss

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Purpose & Summary

Truss is a lightweight secure middleware for distributed computing. The goal of Truss is to provide a simple framework for securely routing jobs, and collecting the produced output, over a heterogeneous network of computers. This means that clients and servers running Truss do not have to be on the same operating system, hardware, or asserted trust level.

A high level architecture overview


Truss accomplishes this by:

• Having a single lightweight code base that is used to implement both clients as well as servers
• Providing a simple and extensible means of authenticating the client (from using a local configuration file within the code, to LDAP integration or other forms of single sign on)
• Encrypting all network traffic with AES128, providing both a reasonable degree of security as well as minimal overhead when compared with plain text transmissions
• Using pre-shared keys to provide a password-authenticated Diffie-Hellman key agreement in order to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks
• Re-negotiating the established Diffie-Hellman agreements periodically in order to prevent an attackers ability to break the encryption and read all previous or future network traffic

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How to compile the code from source

This project uses 100% Mavenized Java code. This means you will need the following in order to compile the code from source:

1. A copy of code (available via Git)
2. A Java JDK
3. Maven installed on your system

Once these prerequisites are made, all you need to do is go to the root of the checkout (this will contain the pom.xml for this project) and then run: mvn clean compile assembly:single. This will download all required dependencies and then compile the project into a single portable jar file.

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Runtime (JVM) variables:

Description	Paramater	Options and Default Value	Applies To
To set the log verbosity	loglevel	off,info,warn,error,fatal (defaults to fatal)	All
To provide the username	user	(default is to prompt the user)	All
To provide the users password	pass	(default is to prompt the user)	All
To provide the pre shared key	key	(default is to prompt the user)	All
Servers IP address	sip	(default is 127.0.0.1)	Client
The servers port	sport	(default is 8080)	Client
The drop off points IP	dip	(default is 127.0.0.1)	Client
The drop off points port	dport	(default is 8080)	Client
Interactive mode	ic	(default is an automatic client, no GUI provided)	Client
The port to listen on	bind	(default is 8080)	Server/Drop Off

Examples of how to launch the code:

Note: The default password for all accounts is "pw". This can be changed in the Shiro.ini file inside the source code. Also, in that same file, Shiro can be integrated with other authentication systems.
Note: The pre-shared key can be anything you want. Longer keys do provide additional security, but keep in mind that the pre-shared key is only used to facilitate the secure negotiation of a new completely random key and will have no lasting impact on the security of the infrastructure.
Note: The ports that the server and drop off server bind to can be anything. However, using ports above 1024 is recommended so in order to not require root or escalated privileges (on some systems).

This would launch a server

java -Duser=server -Dpass=password -Dkey=pre_shared_key -Dloglevel=info -Dbind=server_port -jar Truss*.jar

This would launch a drop off server

java -Duser=dropoff -Dpass=password -Dkey=pre_shared_key -Dloglevel=info -Dbind=server_port -jar Truss*.jar

This would launch an interactive secure client

java -Duser=secure -Dpass=password -Dkey=pre_shared_key -Dloglevel=info -Dsip=server_ip -Dsport=server_port -Ddip=drop_off_server_ip -Ddport=drop_off_server_port -Dic -jar Truss*.jar

This would launch an interactive secure client

java -Duser=insecure -Dpass=password -Dkey=pre_shared_key -Dloglevel=info -Dsip=server_ip -Dsport=server_port -Ddip=drop_off_server_ip -Ddport=drop_off_server_port -Dic -jar Truss*.jar