Security

Warning

osBrain should be considered unsafe when used with remote machines. This package has some security risks. Understanding the risks is very important to avoid creating systems that are very easy to compromise by malicious entities.

Serialization in osBrain

osBrain can use different serializers when passing messages between agents and when configuring and deploying the multi-agent architectures. Among this serializers, some are considered unsafe (pickle, cloudpickle…).

Using these unsafe serializers is a security risk. The main problem is that allowing a program to deserialize arbitrary data can cause arbitrary code execution and this may wreck or compromise your system. Therefore, osBrain is meant to be run only within trusted networks (i.e.: LANs) or with properly encrypted/safe communications (see Protocol encryption).

Network interface binding

By default osBrain binds every server on localhost, to avoid exposing things on a public network or over the internet by mistake. If you want to expose your osBrain agents to anything other than localhost, you have to explicitly tell osBrain the network interface address it should use. This means it is a conscious effort to expose agents to remote machines.

Protocol encryption

osBrain doesn’t encrypt the data it sends over the network. This means you must not transfer sensitive data on untrusted networks (especially user data, passwords, and such) because it is possible to eavesdrop. Either encrypt the data yourself before passing, or run osBrain over a secure network (VPN or SSH tunnel).