leakdb: Web-Scale NoSQL Idempotent Cloud-Native Big-Data Serverless Plaintext Credential Search

by do son · July 19, 2020

LeakDB

LeakDB is a toolset designed to allow organizations to build and deploy their own internal plaintext “Have I Been Pwned”-like service. The LeakDB toolset can normalize, deduplicate, index, sort, and search leaked data sets on the multi-terabyte-scale, without the need to distribute large files to individual users. Once curated, LeakDB can search terabytes of data in less than a tenth of a second, and the LeakDB server exposes a simple JSON API that can be queried using the command line client or any http client. It can be deployed in a serverless configuration with a BigQuery backend (no indexes), or as an offline/traditional server with indexes.

LeakDB uses a configurable bloom filter to remove duplicate entries, sorts indexes using external parallel quicksort (i.e., memory-constrained) with a k-way binary tree merge, and binary tree search to find entries in the index.

Use

Normalizing Data

The first step is to normalize your data sets, details on how to do this can be found here. Be sure to keep all your normalized files in a single directory. This step is the same for both the serverless and server deployments.

Next, you’ll need to decide if you want to set up a traditional server deployment or a serverless deployment, there are benefits and drawbacks to each as described below.

Server Deployment

The server deployment is the cheapest way to setup LeakDB, but you’ll have to compute indexes yourself. The amount of time it takes to compute an index varies depending on the data set and your hardware. LeakDB can sort multiple terabyte data sets on almost any hardware but it could take a very long time. Domain indexes in particular can take a very long time to compute due to the high number of collisions. However, you only have to pay the computational price once. That is to say, once-per-data-set, if you’ve already computed an index and want to add additional data you’ll need to re-sort the entire index (you can save bloom filter results, etc. though), so be sure to collect and normalize all your data before computing the index.

Serverless Deployment

The serverless deployment generally costs more money to run as the backend is BigQuery. With BigQuery you pay for data storage as well as paying per-query; it isn’t particularly expensive unless you start running lots of queries against the data set. It’s also much faster to set up since you don’t have to compute indexes yourself.