Security is very IMPORTANT for any production database. MongoDB provides us with the best PRACTICES to harden out MongoDB DEPLOYMENT. This list of best practices should act as security checklist before we give green light to any production deployment.

• We should enable authentication for our deployment. All clients should require to authenticate before they can access the MongoDB server. Methods like SCRAM-SHA-1, Certificate-based authentication or LDAP can be enabled. It is important to enabling authentication on each MongoDB server as if any server is left that COULD become a POINT of access to intruders.

• We should enable authorization via Role-based access control(RBAC) model for our deployments. There should be a single administrative user to configure other users. We should have unique users for each person and application that access the database. These users should follow the principle of least privilege meaning users should not have access that is not needed. As a best practice, we should group common access privileges to roles and then assign these roles to individual users or groups.
• We should enable encryption for our deployment. All connections via client or between nodes should go through tls/ssl protocols. apart from encrypting communication, it is important to encrypt data at rest using MongoDB native encryption available for WiredTiger. Also, it is important to rotate the encryption keys either by KMIP or any other protocol. Protecting MongoDB data files by assigning appropriate file-system permissions is also important.

• We can significantly affect the security of MongoDB deployment by having a strong Network security process. Firewalls should be configured to control access of our MongoDB systems. On cloud deployments, proper VPC/VPNs should be configured. We should limit network traffic to specific systems on the given port via the use of firewalls. Only traffic from trusted sources should reach Mongod or Mongos instances. MongoDB also supports its own firewall with the configuration bind_ip, using this we can configure connections from specific IP address at the database level.

•  It is important to audit any kind of database configuration changes. Sometimes it may be required to audit changes in data within a database. It should be noted that there are performance implications in enabling auditing.

• We should not run our MongoDB applications from root user. There should be a dedicated user created for individual applications.

• MongoDB should be run using secure configuration options. The HTTP status interface and REST API must be disabled. Also if we are not using operations like MapReduce(), group(), and $where server-side scripting should be disabled. This prevents MongoDB from malicious javascript attacks.