How To Secure The Fastvue Sophos Reporter Web Site

By default, Fastvue Sophos Reporter is open and unrestricted for anonymous users to view. For a number of privacy related reasons you might need to restrict access to the site. You may also want to further restrict access to the Settings tab to prevent unauthorised users from making configuration changes to Sophos Reporter. To improve security even further, it is a good idea to add SSL encryption for authentication.

In this article I will show you how to restrict access to the Sophos Reporter website, and further restrict access to the Settings tab using Windows Authentication and Authorization Rules in IIS, and how to enable SSL (HTTPS) for the site.

Restricting User Access

The simplest way of achieving this is by using IIS authorization rules. There a few prerequisites. All of the following needs to be performed on the Fastvue Sophos Reporter server.

Create Groups

Open Server Manager and browse to Configuration | Local Users and Groups
Create a group for Fastvue Viewers
Populate this group with the AD users and groups that need to view Sophos Reporter’s dashboards and reports
Create a group for Fastvue Admins
Populate this group with the AD users and groups that need access to the Settings Tab

Configuring IIS

All the following steps will be performed in the IIS Management Console on the Fastvue Sophos Reporter server. Depending on your configuration you may need to install the ‘Windows Authentication’ and ‘URL Authorization’ Role Services for IIS in Server Manager.

Enable Authentication

Authorization rules require that users authenticate. We will therefore first enable Windows Authentication.

Select the Fastvue Sophos Reporter IIS site (in this case it is Default Web Site)
Select Authentication
Select and Disable Anonymous Authentication
Select and Enable Windows Authentication

Allow Access to the Site

Select the Fastvue Sophos Reporter IIS site again
Select Authorization Rules
Select Add an Allow Rule
In the specified roles or users group, add the Fastvue Viewers group created earlier
Create another allow rule this time for the Fastvue Administrators
Remove the Allow all users rule

Remove Access to the Settings Tab

At this point user access to the Fastvue Sophos Reporter site will be limited to the users specified in the groups. To restrict access to the Setting tab do the following in the IIS Management Console:

Select and Expand the Fastvue Sophos Reporter site
Select the Settings folder under the Fastvue Sophos Reporter website
Select Authorization Rules
The rules created earlier will be inherited here.
Select and Remove the Fastvue Viewers rule

At this point only the Fastvue Administrators group should have access to the Settings tab. If you are testing this remember to close the browser to end the user sessions.

Securing the site with HTTPS

Any site that requires credentials to be passed should be secured using SSL encryption. This means using HTTPS and certificates. For this article we will be using an internal self-signed certificate but in practice it is better to use a certificate from your internal PKI or a third party CA such as VeriSign.

Generate a Certificate

Open the IIS Management Console
Select the IIS server itself (not the site)
Select Server Certificates
Select Create Self-Signed Certificate
Specify a friendly name for the certificate. A good practice is to use the server’s FQDN name. This will generate a certificate that matches the server’s name.

Add the HTTPS Binding

Select the Fastvue Sophos Reporter IIS website (e.g. Default Web Site on the left)
Under Actions on the right, select Bindings…
Select Add
Change the type to HTTPS
In the SSL certificate box select the Self-Signed Certificate created earlier
Click OK to finish the change

Enforce SSL

Select the Fastvue Sophos Reporter IIS website again on the left
Select SSL Settings
Check the Require SSL Box and then Apply on the right hand side

The Fastvue Sophos Reporter site will now require HTTPS and users to be authenticated. At this point you will see a certificate warning since the self-signed certificate is not from a trusted CA on the client machine. Using either an internal PKI or a third party CA certificate would resolve this issue.

Another issue you will notice is that when attempting to connect to the site using HTTP you will get:

403 – Forbidden: Access is denied Error

To fix this, we can change the 403 error page to redirect us to the HTTPS site.

Customize Error Pages

Still in the IIS Management Console, select the Fastvue Sophos Reporter site on the left
Select Error Pages
Select and Edit 403
Select the Respond with a 302 redirect option
Specify https:// followed by the FQDN of your site. For example, https://fastvue01.mydomain.com. Make sure you specify the S in https://

Now when you try to access the site via plain http, you will be redirected to the https site instead of seeing the 403 error message.

Change the Fastvue Site Settings to use HTTPS

When Fastvue Sophos Reporter sends an email such as a scheduled report or an alert, it uses the URL set in Settings | Site Settings as the domain in these links back to the application. Now that you’ve secured the site using HTTPS, it is a good idea to change the Site Settings to also use HTTPS to avoid being redirected to the root of the website by the custom error page configured above.

To edit the Site Settings:

In Fastvue Sophos Reporter, click the Settings Tab and go to the Site Settings section
Change the URL to use https:// instead of http://
Click Save

Summary

If you followed through the steps above, Fastvue Sophos Reporter will now be secured using Windows Authentication. Two user groups can access Sophos Reporter, but only the admin group can access pages on the Settings tab, and the site can only be accessed via HTTPS / SSL.

By Etienne Liebetrau|2019-07-25T12:58:24+00:00February 4th, 2014|Sophos Reporter|6 Comments

About the Author: Etienne Liebetrau

Based in Cape Town, South Africa, Etienne is an IT Professional working in various environments building, testing and maintaining systems for a large national retail chain. An IT professional since 1996, Etienne has worked in various environments and is certified by (ISC)2, Comptia, Dell and Microsoft. Etienne is the technical blogger and primary technical consultant for FixMyITsystem.com a solutions provider company based in Cape Town with a global client base.

6 Comments

Fastvue Sophos Reporter How To Publish Websites with Sophos UTM Web Server Protection June 30, 2014 at 5:37 pm - Reply
[…] I also encourage you to experiment with the different firewall profiles that Sophos UTM offers aside from the ‘Basic Protection’ profile we selected in the above steps, as well as the Reverse Authentication feature introduced in Sophos UTM 9.2. This is useful for sites such that require corporate authentication details such as Sharepoint, Outlook Web Access, and even Sophos Reporter when using Windows Authentication in IIS. […]
Mark November 5, 2015 at 2:54 pm - Reply
This is great for providing secure access for business support officers responsible for staff activity reports but is it possible to restrict which clients they can prepare reports on? e.g. ICT department managers can only report on ICT staff internet activity or HR managers can only report on HR staff internet activity?
to support this question, we do have Internet Reporting AD groups populated with staff accounts e.g. HRProxyUsers & ICTProxyUsers so the hope is that we can create several report viewers accounts as described in this article but that they are locked down to be able to only report on specific AD account reporting groups as can be done in Sophos Web Appliances.
- Scott Glew November 9, 2015 at 12:54 am - Reply
  Hey Mark,
  This is currently done by setting up and using the Private Report Sharing feature. You can schedule Reports filtered by each AD group and send them to the correct person. They can then hover over items in the report and run further reports, but will never be able to access other reports, or other areas of the software.
  That said, we will be working on a more robust role-based reporting feature soon. This will enable you to provide more of the Fastvue Reporter feature set to your staff, while ensuring they can only report on their team.
  I can’t give you an ETA on this just yet unfortunately, but it’s certainly a common request and we hope to get it out there as soon as we can.
  Cheers!
  Scott
  - Tiago Sell July 3, 2019 at 8:49 pm - Reply
    Hey Scott,
    But if the person that received URL generated by schedule reports erase end of the path (URL) this person will have access to generate other team reports. What I can do to restricted this?
    Tiago
    - Scott Glew July 5, 2019 at 7:30 am - Reply
      Hey Tiago – You can restrict this by opening up access to the /p folder (and the /_ folder where other required resources to load the page get served from), and locking down the rest of the website to admins only. We have an article and video on how to do this here: https://www.fastvue.co/sophos/blog/how-to-secure-fastvue-reporter-for-private-report-sharing/
      This is a temporary measure while we build out full role-based reporting features.
      - Tiago Sell July 24, 2019 at 4:38 pm
        Thats great!
        Is there release date for this features?