Security Considerations

As described in Client-Server Communication, communication between the GRR client and server is secure against eavesdropping and impersonation. Furthermore, the server’s record of flows run and files downloaded is not changed after the fact. It is intended to provide a secure archive of data that has been gathered from machines.

Root Privileges

The GRR client agent normally runs as root, and by design is capable of read any data on the system. Furthermore some flows can use quite a lot of resources on client (e.g. searching a large directory recursively) and in fact the GRR agent does have the ability to download and execute server provided code, though the code does need to be signed.

For these reasons, access to the GRR server should be considered tantamount to have root access to all GRR client machines. While we provide auditing and authorization support to mitigate the risks of this, the risks inherient in this should be understood when configuring and using GRR.