The following steps describe how to enable TLS-encryption in a VNC connection policy.
NOTE:
Some vendors may use custom protocol elements and TLS-encryption that do not have available documentation. As a result, these cannot be audited by One Identity Safeguard for Privileged Sessions (SPS). Regardless of vendors, only the custom features described in the RFC 6143 are supported. As for encryptions, only those completely TLS-encapsulated streams can be processed where the TLS encryption process was started before the VNC protocol handshake.
Prerequisites
Depending on your requirements, one or more of the following might be needed:
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An X.509 certificate and its private key. SPS can display the same certificate to the peers on both the client and the server side. You can also use different certificates for the client and server sides. Use your own PKI system to generate these certificates, as they cannot be created on SPS. Note that the Common Name of the certificate must contain the domain name or the IP address of SPS, otherwise the clients might reject the certificate.
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To generate certificates on-the-fly for a connection, a signing certificate authority is required. For details on creating a signing CA, see Signing certificates on-the-fly.
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To require the peers of SPS to have an X.509 certificate signed by a specific Certificate Authority, a list of the trusted certificate authorities is needed. For details on creating a trusted CA list, see Verifying certificates with Certificate Authorities.
TIP: One Identity recommends using 2048-bit RSA keys (or stronger).
To enable TLS-encryption in a VNC connection policy
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Navigate to VNC Control > Connections and select the connection policy in which you want to enable TLS.
Figure 248: VNC Control > Connections — Enabling TLS-encryption for VNC connections
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Set the encryption settings used between the client and SPS in the Client-side transport security settings section.
To require encryption, select TLS. When the connection is encrypted, SPS has to show a certificate to the peer.
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Select how SPS should authenticate the peers.
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To permit connections from peers without requesting a certificate, select No certificate is required.
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To permit connections only from peers with a valid certificate that was signed by a specific CA, complete the following steps.
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Create a list of trusted Certificate Authorities that will be used to validate the certificates of the peers. For details on creating a trusted CA list, see Verifying certificates with Certificate Authorities.
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Select Only accept certificates authenticated by the trusted CA list.
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Select the certificate authority list to use in the Trusted CA field.
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Set the encryption settings used between SPS and the server in the Server-side transport security settings section.
To require encryption, select TLS. When the connection is encrypted, SPS has to show a certificate to the peer.
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Select the certificate to show to the server.
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To use the same certificate for every peer, complete the following steps.
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Generate and sign a certificate for SPS in your PKI system, and export the certificate and its private key.
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Select Use the same certificate for each connection.
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Select Private key for host certificate, click 
and upload the private key.
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Select X.509 host certificate, click and upload the certificate.
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To use a separate certificate for every connection, complete the following steps.
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Create a certificate authority that will be used to sign the certificates that SPS shows to the peer. For details, see Signing certificates on-the-fly.
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Select Generate certificate on-the-fly.
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Select the certificate authority to use in the Signing CA field.
Limitations
NOTE: When using the Use the same certificate for each connection option and the connection policy that allows access to multiple servers using HTTPS, the client applications will display a warning because the certificate used in the connection will be invalid (namely, the Common Name of the certificate will not match the hostname or IP address of the server).
NOTE: Import the certificate of the signing Certificate Authority to your clients. Otherwise, the client applications will display a warning due to the unknown Certificate Authority.
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Select how SPS should authenticate the peers.
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To permit connections from peers without requesting a certificate, select No certificate is required.
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To permit connections only from peers with a valid certificate that was signed by a specific CA, complete the following steps.
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Create a list of trusted Certificate Authorities that will be used to validate the certificates of the peers. For details on creating a trusted CA list, see Verifying certificates with Certificate Authorities.
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Select Only accept certificates authenticated by the trusted CA list.
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Select the certificate authority list to use in the Trusted CA field.
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Click 
.
Expected result
The encryption settings are applied to the connection policy.
VNC settings determine the parameters of the connection on the protocol level, including timeout value, and so on.
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Caution:
Modifying the VNC settings is recommended only to advanced users. Do not modify these settings unless you exactly know what you are doing. |
To create a new VNC settings profile or edit an existing one
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Navigate to VNC Control > Settings and click 
to create a VNC setting profile. Enter a name for the profile (for example vnc_special).
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Click 
to display the parameters of the connection.
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Modify the parameters as needed. The following parameters are available:
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Network idle timeout: Connection timeout value in seconds. To avoid early timeout, set it to a larger value, for example a week (604800 seconds).
Even if the user is not active, the session can contain activity that must be audited (for example, the output of a script). The idle timeout period will start only after this activity has stopped.
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Caution:
Determining if a connection is idle is based on the network traffic generated by the connection, not the activity of the user. For example, if an application or the taskbar of a graphical desktop displays the time which is updated every minute, it generates network traffic every minute, negating the effects of timeout values greater than one minute and preventing One Identity Safeguard for Privileged Sessions (SPS) from closing the connection. |
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User idle timeout: If no user activity is detected, terminate the session after the configured time has passed since the last user activity.
This can be useful if only user-generated network traffic is important in a session. By using this option, situations described in the caution of Network idle timeout (such as a taskbar clock keeping the network traffic open indefinitely) can be avoided. To enable user idle timeout, select Enable user idle timeout and enter a value that is greater than or equal to the value of Network idle timeout.
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Enable pre channel check: Select this option to evaluate the connection and channel policies before establishing the server-side connection. That way if the connection is not permitted at all, SPS does not establish the server-side connection.
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Click .
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Select this settings profile in the VNC settings field of your connections.
One Identity Safeguard for Privileged Sessions (SPS) can index the contents of audit trails using its own indexer service or external indexers. Indexing extracts the text from the audit trails and segments it to tokens. A token is a segment of the text that does not contain whitespace: for example words, dates (2009-03-14), MAC or IP addresses, and so on. The indexer returns the extracted tokens to SPS, which builds a comprehensive index from the tokens of the processed audit trails.
Once indexed, the contents of the audit trails can be searched from the web interface. SPS can extract the commands typed and the texts seen by the user in terminal sessions, and text from graphical protocols like RDP, Citrix ICA, and VNC. Window titles are also detected.
SPS has an internal indexer, which runs on the SPS appliance. In addition to the internal indexer, external indexers can run on Linux hosts.
Processing and indexing audit trails requires significant computing resources. If you have to audit lots of connections, or have a large number of custom reports configured, consider using an external indexer to decrease the load on SPS. For sizing recommendations, ask your One Identity partner or contact our Support Team.
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The internal indexer service runs on the SPS appliance. It supports languages based on the Latin-, Greek- and Cyrillic alphabets, as well as Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages, allowing it to recognize texts from graphical audit trails in 100+ languages. It can also generate screenshots for content search results.
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The external indexer runs on Linux hosts and instances. It uses the same engine as the indexer service of SPS, and has the same capabilities and limitations.
SPS can work with multiple external indexers to process audit trails.
NOTE: The version of the external indexer must be equal to or greater than the version of One Identity Safeguard for Privileged Sessions (SPS). To make sure you meet this criterion, One Identity recommends that you always upgrade your external indexer when you upgrade SPS. You can check that SPS has established a connection to the external indexer on the Indexer > Worker status page of the SPS web interface.
NOTE: If a text is displayed for less than 1 second, it is not indexed.
If you have indexed trails, the index is archived every 30 days.
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Caution:
Hazard of data loss! Make sure you also back up your data besides archiving it.
For more information, see Data and configuration backups.
If a system crash occurs, you can lose up to 30 days of index, since the index is only archived every 30 days. |
Reindex audit trails
In certain cases, reindexing already indexed audit trails might be necessary, for example, if the audit trails were indexed without full screen content but you still need to search in the screen content. In this case, the audit trails can be reindexed with a different indexer configuration to perform screen content extraction. For more information, contact our Support Team.
Reindexing lucene indices enables you to use reindexed indices with Elasticsearch.
NOTE: Reindexing can be very time consuming. To avoid unwanted reindexing, see the following examples below for setting time and initiating dry start.
To reindex lucene indices
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Create and run the following python script from the core shell.
#!/usr/bin/env python
from datetime import datetime
import os.path
content_store_changed_filename="/opt/scb/var/upgrade/content-store-changed-time/content_store_changed_timestamp"
if not os.path.isfile(content_store_changed_filename):
print("The "+content_store_changed_filename+" file does not exist. This file contains the information when lucene storage was updated to elastic search.")
exit()
f=open(content_store_changed_filename)
s=float(f.read())
f.close()
my_date = datetime.fromtimestamp(s)
print("Run this command to reindex everything before lucene->elasticsearch update:")
print("indexerctl reindex query \"*\" --end "+my_date.isoformat())
You will receive a result similar to this:
Example
indexerctl reindex query "*" --end 2021-05-22T20:21:05.604341
The example shows that all items will be reindexed until 2021-05-22 20:21:05.
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You can set the start time parameter and check the list of items scheduled for reindexing:
Example
indexerctl reindex query "*" --end 2021-05-22T20:21:05.604341 --dry --start 2021-05-22T18:21:05.604341
The example shows that all indices will be reindexed between 2021-05-22 18:21:05 and 2021-05-22 20:21:05.
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If you are satisfied with the results, start reindexing:
Example
indexerctl reindex query "*" --end 2021-05-22T20:21:05.604341 --start 2021-05-22T18:21:05.604341
