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  • GMC added a new security platform

  • The platform allows them to block incoming requests

  • They blocked ours but then disabled it

  • They will not block requests anymore until the new reval is live

  • Will not be an issue with new reval - which uses a later version of the tool which should not trigger the GMC’s security platform from blocking the requestsit is written in a more up to date language version and is not blocked by the GMC filtering criteria

Timeline

08:08

08:30

Created ticket and incident page

2021-03-01 Legacy Reval: unable to submit revalidation - User Agent/Cloudfre Cloudflare GMC Issue

09:15

Rerun failed with the same error… Forbidden (HTTP 403)

09:33

Pinged users to let them know we have contacted GMC to check the issue

09:34

Emailed GMC

10:43

Replied to GMC to confirm its the Production/Live environment and not our new Reval module

11:47

GMC have made some changes over the weekend, they are looking into it

16:10

Email to chase GMC

16:31

16:53

Confirming with the GMC what IPs we are hitting

17:50

Email back from GMC

10:55

We found that with the new reval module, no issues, we are able to get data

However, the issue is with legacy/existing.

Need to check if the IPs/Servers that legacy reval runs on are still whitelisted

11:01

11:46

Checking if authentication error

16:10

We confused the GMC

11:17

Call to investigate further - more fault analysis done,

  • review errors and look at gmc-sync repo to see where the problem might be

Some Findings

  • 403 in place in Prod as it is an authentication issue in our side.

  • We are able to curl the GMC end points which shows that the credentials are correct but the Java code is not able to get them due to some restrictions (?) in our Prod2.

  • We know 99 error in stage as the IPs are not white listed by GMC for our stage env3.

  • We want to trace logging in Java code so that we can see the credentials are fetched correctly

14:00

  • Call to review draft PR created to check authentication issues - what are GMC sending us - what response

  • 1st of the month and timings - nothing has changed for 6 months so why a change now - version updates?

14:11

  • tried to update java base - didn't do anything

14:41

  • Updated PR waiting for review

15:17

  • PR reviewed

  • Ran gmc-sync-prod and it failed as expected

  • Investigating now with the extra logging

15:30

  • its getting the correct username and password but still failing

  • Before it gets to the gmc return code it throws exception

  • The app is failing in the SOAP API call

16:33

Email to GMC

16:38

So just to sum up our thought process:

  • We can CURL Prod (Authentication is fine)

  • There have been no significant recent changes to the codebase

  • The Java app appears to be building the request correctly

  • The Java app appears to be using the correct credentials

  • We are still receiving 403 from GMC endpoint

Conclusion: most likely cause is a permissions error (Authorization issue) internally on GMC side

16:42

16:50

Updated users on teams with our conclusion

17:06

Clarification of IPs

05:47

22:02

Email from the GMC - they have been able to re-create the 403 error

22:48 to 23:19

  • Cloudflare (now being used by the GMC) - Cloudflare Browser Integrity Check seems to block Java 8 user agents by default.

  • GMC-Sync with Java 9 and Java 11 didn't work (no surprise there)

  • Changed back to Java 8 and it's working now

00:05

  • 00:05 cron run of the GMC-Sync ran successfully, so after the intrepid ETL runs at 01:00 Reval should be working again

08:02

  • Slim-buster image (presumably with a later update of Java 8) - we don’t think the GMC modified any the rules in Cloudflare.

  • Using a recent maintained docker base image (as long as it works with the GMC config) - that would be using the slim-buster image.

08:08

  • User reports fixed

09:59

Trying to get some clarification from the GMC relating to the user agent

11:26

GMC disabled the security feature relating to the user agent so thats why it worked

We need to update the user agent

13:05

10:06

Chasing GMC - No reply regarding User agent / is there filtering back on?

14:18

Reply from GMC and some thoughts

  • What the LTS status of those two Java 8 versions

  • Assuming they're in LTS, are the GMC willing and able to tweak their Cloudflare config to allow in future?

  • New reval is Java 11, So just keep the filtering disabled until we switch over is an option?

15:37

  • Java 8 has LTS until 2030 so GMC are blocking/filtering something that is supported

  • We don’t want to spend effort on the existing module

  • New module in Java 11 won’t have an issue so requested GMC just leave the filter then enabled for now turned off

16:33

  • GMC ok to disable the Cloudflare filter until new reval developed

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