ConfMod: A Simple Modeling of Confidentiality Requirements for Inter-Organizational Data Sharing

About

The present work is currently under submission. This repository contains preliminary information and will be fully populated at a later point in time.

License

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

If you are planning to integrate parts of our work into a commercial product and do not want to disclose your source code, please contact us for other licensing options via email at pennekamp (at) comsys (dot) rwth-aachen (dot) de

Acknowledgments

Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany's Excellence Strategy – EXC-2023 Internet of Production – 390621612.

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Quickstart

The quickest way to get the application running is by using docker.

Open a shell at the root of the repository and run

$ docker compose up --build

This starts a web server with the application listening on port 8080. You can now opan a web browser and navigate to http://localhost:8080/.

Hint: Once the containers have been built, the --build flag can be omitted.

Example Data

We provide example data that corresponds to the information presented in the paper (see directory example/). More information will follow once the paper has been accepted.

Development

This repository consists of three subprojects. A library and an application are made up of a backend and a frontend part. The library and application backend are implemented in Python while the application frontend is written in Typescript (Strongly typed Javascript).

The Python codebases require the python interpreter. Furthermore, they use poetry for dependency management. The Javscript frontend requires Nodejs and npm (included with Nodejs installation) for development.

libconfmod

A Python library that implements the ConfMod core functionality.

Requirements

• Python3.12
• pip
• poetry

Getting Started

To get started with the project, please conduct the following steps:

• Install Python3.12, pip, and poetry.
• Navigate to confmod/ as your working directory.
• Create a virtual environment for the project. poetry env use can be used for this.
• Use poetry shell to spawn a shell with an active virtual environment for the library project.
• Run poetry install to download and install the project dependencies.

Congratulations, you are now set and can start working on the codebase.

Building

To build the library, ensure the current working directory is at confmod/ and the virtual environment is active.

The project is built using poetry:

$ poetry build

ConfMod Backend

The ConfMod backend uses libConfMod and the FastAPI framework to provide a web api that is consumed by the frontend to provide a visual configuration.

Requirements

• Python3.12
• pip
• poetry

Getting started

To get started with the project, please conduct the following steps:

• Ensure Python3.12, pip, and poetry are installed
• Build the library (see above instructions on how to build)
• Navigate to confmod-app/backend as your working directory.
• Create a virtual environment for the project. poetry env use can be used for this.
• Use poetry shell to spawn a shell with an active virtual environment for the library project.
• Run poetry install to download and install the project dependencies.

Congratulations, you are now set and can start working on the codebase.

Running in development mode

To execute the web server set confmod-app/backend/ as the working directory, spawn a shell with your virtual environment (e.g., using poetry shell), and run the following command

$ poetry run main.py

By default, the app is served at port 8080, and the API is accessible from the URL path /api.

ConfMod Frontend

The frontend is a single-page application that connects to the backend server to provide a website as a visual interface where one can configure the confModels.

Getting started

• Ensure Nodejs is installed. If you do not have Nodejs and are unsure which version to install, choose the latest LTS version.
• In a terminal, navigate to confmod-app/frontend
• Install project dependencies with npm install.

Running in Development Mode

To run the frontend, ensure the backend server is running (see above for necessary steps). Then, a local development server for the frontend can be started with

$ npm run start

This server has the nice feature that it automatically restarts whenever you change one of the frontend's source files.

Typings Provided by OpenAPI

Using FastAPI as the backend server comes with OpenAPI specifications out of the box, allowing the automatic generation of typings and a client for the web API served by the backend. Whenever the API of the backend changes, the typings and the client must be re-generated using the openapi-generator. The package.json contains a prebuild command for convenience, which can be run with:

npm run generate-openapi-client

Hint: if the backend does not use the default configuration, the URL after the -i parameter needs to be changed accordingly

Building

The code of the frontend can be bundled into a set of files that a regular web server like nginx can serve statically. This step is achieved using the build script from the package.json.

npm run build

Configuration

This section describes how the application can be configured.

Backend

The backend can be configured via environment variables. All the variables below can optionally be prefixed with CONFMOD_.

• PORT: The network port where the API server listens (default: 8080).
• LISTEN_ADDR: The host address where the server listens. Use 0.0.0.0 to listen on all interfaces (default: 0.0.0.0).
• LOG_LEVEL: Defines how verbose the logging is (default: INFO).
• API_BASE_URL: URL prefix from where the API will be served (default: /api).

Using a .env file

All the above variables can be set by using a .env file in the confmod-app/backend directory, where each line in the file contains a pair of the form VARIABLE=value.

Docker deployment

For simple deployment, there is a docker-compose file that sets up and orchestrates two containers.

1. A Python web server that provides the application backend (Dockerfile: backend.Dockerfile).
2. A nginx web server that serves the static files of the frontend and proxies api requests to the backend server (Dockerfile: confmod-app/frontend/Dockerfile)

To build the containers, run docker-compose build from the repository's root directory.

To create the containers and start them run docker-compose up.

If the containers have been started and one wants to reuse them, simply execute docker-compose start. WARNING: Rebuilding the containers will result in loss of data!

Containers

Backend

The container runs a FastAPI web server that provides the ConfMod web API. In the default configuration, it is not exposed to the host but proxied to an nginx web server.

Properties

Image Properties:

• Dockerfile: backend.Dockerfile
• Build Context: . (root of repository)
• Ports: 8080
• Entrypoint: [ "poetry", "run", "main.py" ]
• Env Variables: none
• Workdir: /confmod/app

Container Properties:

• Ports mapped to Host: none,
• Bind Mounts: none

Configuration

Configuration is possible via environment variables as given in the Section Configuration.

Nginx

A web server that served the static files of the frontend and proxies calls to the backend API. By default only this web server is accessible from the host.

Properties

Image Properties:

• Dockerfile: confmod-app/frontend/Dockerfile
• Build Context: ./confmod-app/frontend
• Ports: 8080
• Entrypoint: same as nginx base image
• Env Variables: none
• Workdir: /confmod/app

Container Properties:

• Ports mapped to Host:
  • Container: 8080
  • Host: 8080
• Bind Mounts:
  • Container: /etc/nginx/conf.d/app-confmod.conf
  • Host: ./confmod-app/frontend/nginx/app-confmod.conf

Configuration

The nginx configuration can be changed via the configuration in confmod-app/frontend/nginx/app-confmod.conf. If more sophisticated changes to the nginx configuration need to be made, one can provide a custom nginx.conf and mount it at /etc/nginx/nginx.conf.

Please note that there are some common issues if you override the default configuration. Please refer to the documentation of the used nginx image.