Ensuring Liferay Sync Security

As an administrator, you have a stake in the security of all connections to and from your servers. As long as Liferay DXP is configured to use HTTPS, Sync clients use user-supplied credentials to communicate securely. Users can only access the documents and Sites they’re permitted to access. To support Security Mode in the Sync mobile client and securely transmit files, your Liferay DXP server must also use SSL. The next section demonstrates how Sync’s permissions work with your Liferay DXP instance’s permissions.

Liferay Sync Permissions Demonstration

Sync uses Liferay DXP’s default permissions to determine files and folders to sync with the user’s devices. It can only sync files a user can access. After installing the desktop Sync client, follow the steps below to test this functionality.

First, enter classified information into a new text file and save it on your desktop as secret.txt. Then use your browser to sign into Liferay DXP and create a new user with the user name secretagent and the email address secretagent@example.com. Give this user a password and then create a new private Site called Secret Site. Create a page on the Site and add the Documents and Media app to it. Then add the secretagent user to the Secret Site and grant the Site Administrator Role to the user. Log in as secretagent and navigate to the Secret Site. Then upload the secret.txt document to the Documents and Media app. Make sure you also have a user that isn’t a member of the Secret Site and therefore doesn’t have access to any of its documents through Sync. If you don’t have such a user, create one now.

Next, configure your Liferay Sync client to sign in with the secretagent user’s credentials and sync with the Secret Site. Open the Liferay Sync menu from the system tray and select Preferences. In the Accounts tab, click the plus icon at the window’s bottom left to add an account. Provide the secretagent user’s credentials and uncheck all Sites except the Secret Site. Now confirm that Sync downloaded the secret.txt file to your new Sync folder. Open it and check that it contains the text classified information. Next, use Sync to connect to your Liferay DXP instance with the user that doesn’t belong to the Secret Site. The file doesn’t sync because this user isn’t a Site member.

Now go to Sync Connector Admin and set the Secret Site’s default file permissions to View Only. Create a new user, add it to the Secret Site, and add its account in your Liferay Sync client. As with the secretagent user, Sync downloads the secret.txt file to this user’s local Sync folder because the user is a member of the Secret Site. Now edit and save this file. Even though you can edit and save it locally, the edits aren’t synced because the Site’s default file permissions are View Only. After attempting the sync, a red x appears next to the file in the local Sync folder. Right click the file to see the error. It confirms the user doesn’t have the required permissions.

Figure 1: The upload error occurs because the user only has permission to view files.

Figure 1: The upload error occurs because the user only has permission to view files.

To confirm that the error didn’t propagate through Sync, open the file in the secretagent user’s local Sync folder. It still contains the original text. Likewise, the original file remains in the Site’s Documents and Media portlet. To get rid of the error in the other user’s local Sync folder, return there and then right click the file and select Download From Server. This replaces the file with the latest file in the Liferay DXP instance.

Now edit secret.txt in the secretagent user’s local Sync folder. When you check the file in the other user’s local Sync folder and in the Liferay DXP instance, notice that Sync propagated the edits. The changes were propagated because the secretagent user owns the file in the instance. Owners can do anything with their files, even when the Site’s default file permissions are set to View Only.

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