transfer-coronavirus-data-service

Serve files from S3 based on a user database managed in Cognito.

Cognito User Management

Provide access to data about vulnerable users to local authorities for home support and to wholesalers for home delivery.

The data needs to be access controlled to ensure that we are not exposing sensitive data to the wrong people.

The data is being broken down by local authority and sanitised into S3 with appropriate data for the relevant consumers.

The access is controlled by a flask app running on PaaS using AWS Cognito to authenticate users. We import lists of users supplied by MHCLG into Cognito. Users are notified by email and required to supply a 2FA code via SMS.

Once logged in, the app collects a set of objects from S3 which match the prefixes supplied as a ; delimited list in the custom:paths attribute for their account.

The links are presigned URLs to S3 with a short expiration time.

S3 folder layout

• web-app-[env]-data
  • local_authority (only accessed if is_la is true)
    • blackpool
  • wholesaler
  • dwp

This configuration is handled via an ignored file called s3paths.json

GDS users can generate this file by running make s3paths

Admin interface

Using the admin interface:

cd app/
eval $(gds aws security-test -e); make admin_test

or

cd app/
eval $(gds aws govuk-corona-data-staging-cognito -e); make admin_staging

or

cd app/
eval $(gds aws govuk-corona-data-prod-cognito -e); make admin_prod

Open http://localhost:8000...

Changing users access

aws cognito-idp admin-update-user-attributes --user-pool-id eu-west-2_uXyAx3ObX --username ollie --user-attributes Name=custom:paths,Value='local_authority/london/bexley;local_authority/london/greenwich' Name=custom:is_la,Value=1 --region eu-west-2

Updating email

aws cognito-idp admin-update-user-attributes --user-pool-id eu-west-2_AAA --username BBB --user-attributes Name=email,Value=CCC Name=email_verified,Value=true --region eu-west-2

Where AAA is the rest of the user pool ID, BBB is the username and CCC is email address.

Updating phone numbers:

aws cognito-idp admin-update-user-attributes --user-pool-id eu-west-2_AAA --username BBB --user-attributes Name=phone_number,Value=CCC Name=phone_number_verified,Value=true --region eu-west-2

Where AAA is the rest of the user pool ID, BBB is the username and CCC is phone number in +441234567891 format.

Resetting a user's password

This must be done by the user. Check their details, email and phone number in the console or by running:

aws cognito-idp list-users --user-pool-id eu-west-2_AAA --region eu-west-2 --filter "username = 'BBB'" | jq

Where AAA is rest of the user pool and BBB is username.

At the bottom of the login is a "Forgot your password?" link. This will email the user a code.

This is also the link.

How to run

To run the app locally you will need the following parameters defined in AWS Systems Manager > Parameter Store

/transfer-coronavirus-data-service/cognito/client_id
/transfer-coronavirus-data-service/cognito/client_secret
/transfer-coronavirus-data-service/cognito/domain
/transfer-coronavirus-data-service/s3/bucket_name

make run

Run a local python server running the flask app on port 8000

make install

Install the dev and runtime requirements

make checks

Run linters black, flake8 etc.

make test

Run linters and then pytests

make zip

Build the distributable zip file for shipping to PaaS

End to end testing

Run locally

You need to export some local environment variables. You can add them to behave_env.sh (included in .gitignore). Contents should be like the following:

export E2E_STAGING_ROOT_URL=https://localhost:8000/
export E2E_STAGING_USERNAME=[e2e_username_value]
export E2E_STAGING_PASSWORD=[e2e_password_value]

The credentials should be for a cognito account which is able to login without an MFA SMS.

Then (assuming you have the correct permissions) you can run

source behave_env.sh
eval $(gds aws security-test -e); make e2e

Running against staging

The tests are automatically run against staging in the pipeline but can be run manually by assuming a different role and setting different credentials.

Configuration

The config.py module provides an interface to the
standard Flask app.config. The interface makes it easier and more effective to set and get configuration values. We retrieve configuration settings without having to import the app every time by using config functions in modules which don't have access to the flask app object.

A number of settings are passed into the app as environment variables and these are loaded into app.config as the first step of the local run module and the lambda lambda_handler module.