There are certain components in Graylog which will perform outgoing HTTP requests. Among those, are event notifications and HTTP-based data adapters.

Allowing Graylog to interact with resources using arbitrary URLs may pose a security risk. HTTP requests are executed from Graylog servers and might therefore be able to reach more sensitive systems than an external user would have access to, including AWS EC2 metadata, which can contain keys and other secrets, Elasticsearch and others.

It is therefore advisable to restrict access by explicitly whitelisting URLs which are considered safe. HTTP requests will be validated against the Whitelist and are prohibited if there is no Whitelist entry matching the URL.

Configuring the Whitelist

The Whitelist configuration is located at System/Configurations. The Whitelist is enabled by default.

Disabling the Whitelist

If the security implications mentioned above are of no concern, the Whitelist can be completely disabled. When disabled, HTTP requests will not be restricted.

“Exact match” Whitelist entries

Whitelist entries of type  Exact match  contain a string which will be matched against a URL by direct comparison. If the URL is equal to this string, it is considered to be whitelisted.

“Regex” Whitelist entries

Whitelist entries of type Regex contain a regular expression. If a URL matches the regular expression, the URL is considered to be whitelisted. Graylog uses the Java Pattern class to evaluate regular expressions.