Single EC2

For a single deployment of MetaDefender in a public subnet. In this example, besides the MetaDefender EC2 instance, additional resources are being generated and set up.

By using predefined CloudFormation scripts the deployment time will be roughly 3 minutes for this single MetaDefender deployment

Prerequisites and Requirements

AWS knowledge: This guide assumes familiarity with EC2, CloudWatch, Lambda and Cloudformation.

AWS account: needs permission to create EC2 instances

DNS: MetaDefender Core uses the internal routing of the host instance and does not require any special routing.

Scripting languages supported: Windows - Powershell, Linux - shell

System/OS requirements

For OS, database type, 3rd party dependencies and storage requirements on Windows installations, please refer to the Microsoft Windows Deployments section of the Recommended System Configuration page.

For OS, database type, 3rd party dependencies and storage requirements on Linux installations, please refer to the Linux Deployments section of the Recommended System Configuration page.

Deployment flow

Launch Instance

• Go to the EC2 Management Console in AWS and select Launch Instance

• Select the desired MetaDefender, based on the OS support:

• Choose the Instance type

Please review MetaDefender's system requirements (OS and hardware requirements) before choosing the desired AMI and instance type.

Networking for EC2

• Select the desired VPC and subnet you would like to have MetaDefender deployed.

Depending on the deployment model, the recommendation would be to deploy MetaDefender in a private subnet, with no Internet Connection.

From security perspective, no IAM role is needed as of right now for MetaDefender. However, depending on the deployment model, it might be needed in order to have access to different internal resources

• Lambda functions:
• if Lambda functions are used for product activation/deactivation or to process uploaded files to S3, define an IAM role that grants access to those resources and attach it to the instance
• Advanced Details:
• Recommended would be to add an User Data script to do the following:
• Change default credentials from admin/admin to admin/instance-id
• Activate the product

See OPSWAT's Github account for scripts references.

Storage configuration

Storage step can be skipped

In general there's no need for additional storage by MetaDefender. However, there are 2 situations where additional local storage might be required:

• MetaDefender will process large files or a high volume of files which submitted in MetaDefender's queue will need over 10GB files storage
• MetaDefender is configured to store files in the Quarantine section which will eventually fill the entire root volume.

In case quarantining the files in the MetaDefender instance or analyzing high volumes of files is a requirement, please consider adding an EBS volume.

Security Groups configuration

There are 2 rules that are needed to be opened during the installation phase, after which only one rule should remain:

• Custom TCP: 8008

  • MetaDefender exposes it's REST API by default to port 8008. However this port can be changed during the installation phase or updated during it's lifetime.

• RDP / SSH

  • In order to install MetaDefender on Windows add access for RDP and for Linux add support for SSH
    • Highly recommended would be not to allow traffic to RDP or SSH from anywhere, but to limit to your IP address

Launch the instance

After you review the settings, hit Launch. In a few minutes the instance should become available

Additional Steps

User Data

• In case you've added a User Data script, make sure that running User Data is enabled on the new instance

For instances running Windows OS versions, make sure that Windows Firewall will allow traffic to 8008.

In order to do that, RDP into the instance, open Windows Firewall and Advanced Security and create a New Rule for Inbound. Select Ports and choose the port you'll going to use for MetaDefender API (default is 8008).