Summary
This patch adds the RPC whitelisting feature requested in #12248. RPC Whitelists help enforce application policies for services being built on top of Bitcoin Core (e.g., your Lightning Node maybe shouldn’t be adding new peers). The aim of this PR is not to make it advisable to connect your Bitcoin node to arbitrary services, but to reduce risk and prevent unintended access.
Using RPC Whitelists
The way it works is you specify (in your bitcoin.conf) configurations such as
0rpcauth=user1:4cc74397d6e9972e5ee7671fd241$11849357f26a5be7809c68a032bc2b16ab5dcf6348ef3ed1cf30dae47b8bcc71
1rpcauth=user2:181b4a25317bff60f3749adee7d6bca0$d9c331474f1322975fa170a2ffbcb176ba11644211746b27c1d317f265dd4ada
2rpcauth=user3:a6c8a511b53b1edcf69c36984985e$13cfba0e626db19061c9d61fa58e712d0319c11db97ad845fa84517f454f6675
3rpcwhitelist=user1:getnetworkinfo
4rpcwhitelist=user2:getnetworkinfo,getwalletinfo, getbestblockhash
5rpcwhitelistdefault=0
Now user1 can only call getnetworkinfo, user2 can only call getnetworkinfo or getwalletinfo, while user3 can still call all RPCs.
If any rpcwhitelist is set, act as if all users are subject to whitelists unless rpcwhitelistdefault is set to 0. If rpcwhitelistdefault is set to 1 and no rpcwhitelist is set, act as if all users are subject to whitelists.
Review Request
In addition to normal review, would love specific review from someone working on LN (e.g., @ roasbeef) and someone working on an infrastructure team at an exchange (e.g., @ jimpo) to check that this works well with their system.
Notes
The rpc list is spelling sensitive – whitespace is stripped though. Spelling errors fail towards the RPC call being blocked, which is safer.
It was unclear to me if HTTPReq_JSONRPC is the best function to patch this functionality into, or if it would be better to place it in exec or somewhere else.
It was also unclear to me if it would be preferred to cache the whitelists on startup or parse them on every RPC as is done with multiUserAuthorized. I opted for the cached approach as I thought it was a bit cleaner.
Future Work
In a future PR, I would like to add an inheritance scheme. This seemed more controversial so I didn’t want to include that here. Inheritance semantics are tricky, but it would also make these whitelists easier to read.
It also might be good to add a getrpcwhitelist
command to facilitate permission discovery.
Tests
Thanks to @ emilengler for adding tests for this feature. The tests cover all cases except for where rpcwhitelistdefault=1
is used, given difficulties around testing with the current test framework.