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Salesforce Health Check Custom Baseline
Introduction
The Salesforce Health Check has been around for a year or so now, debuting in the Spring 16 release of Salesforce (and bearing a striking resemblance to an app exchange listing with the same name). The Salesforce Help topic gives chapter and verse on this so I’m not going to spend any time on the basic functionality, except to say that it’s a great tool for allowing you to see at a glance how your Salesforce org shapes up security-wise. There has been one caveat though, the baseline it is compared against is set by Salesforce not you, which means that if your security standard differs from the one true path you’ll see warnings and errors. As anyone who has accepted a unit test failure for more than one build knows, as soon as people expect errors they stop counting how many there are. Thus you may start out accepting a single warning, before you know it you have a number of potential security problems which are being ignored because “that page always shows errors”.
Custom Baselines
Spring 17 introduced the beta of custom baselines - this allows you to deviate from the Salesforce standard and supply your own baseline which reflects your security requirements. From now on if your Health Check page shows an error or exception, that means you have a real security issue and need to deal with it quickly.
While you could create a custom baseline from scratch, the easiest way is to export the standard baseline and amend it. Navigate to Setup -> Security Controls -> Health Check and click the gear icon, then ‘Export XML’ from the resulting context menu:
This downloads the baseline to a file named ‘baseline.xml’ (or baseline (1,2,3,etc).xml if you keep downloading it to the same place on a mac!), which you can then open in your favourite editor - I like Atom for XML files. Again, the Salesforce Help does a great job of explaining the format of the XML file so I’m not going to cover this. A couple of things to bear in mind:
- You must change the Name and DeveloperName of the Baseline element, otherwise you’ll be trying to overwrite the standard, which you can’t do.
- When you import the file, do it via the Lightning Experience. If you try this in class and you get an error you get no information that an error has occurred. According to the help “If your import fails, you receive a detailed message in Lightning Experience to help you resolve the problem”, which is pretty big talk when the actual message is
Changing the Baseline
One area where my dev org is considered substandard is the password expiration time. I have my passwords set up never to expire, as forcing users to change their passwords regularly often results in them choosing predictable passwords that are easier to break. The Salesforce health check standard generates a Medium Risk alert if the value is over 90 days and a High Risk alert if the value is over 180 days.
Here’s the section of the file that configures this:
If I change the standard value to the numeric equivalent of Never Expires, 2147483647.0, and the warning to one higher:
and import the updated XML file using the context menu shown above, I can then switch my Health Check to the custom baseline and my password expiration is now at a satisfactory level:
I am not a security consultant
Notwithstanding the fact that forcing users to change their passwords regularly is out of favour in some places, you should not take this post as my advising you about your password policies in any shape or form. If you base your security settings on things that you read in random blog posts then best of luck to you - I did it in a dev org to show the functionality as there’s nothing that I really care about in there.
I’d expect the majority of custom baselines to be making the security standard more restrictive, in regulated industries for example, but what you should set up is a baseline that aligns with your corporate security policies.
Here comes the wish list
Anyone familiar with my blogs or Medium stories knows that I usually have a wish list around Salesforce functionality, so if any product managers are reading this, here’s what I’d like to see:
- A way to email out the health check, run against a custom baseline, on a schedule. Security and compliance departments can receive this first thing in the morning and spend the day focusing on other systems.
- Notifications when the health check result changes - if my Evil Co-Worker blags admin rights and changes the configuration to allow previous passwords to be re-used, I want to know about it. (Ideally I’d receive an automated report at the end of every day detailing everything the Evil Co-Worker has done, but that might be asking too much).
- A way to snapshot the health check output regularly, so that I can see if an org is trending towards a more or less baseline compliant security setup.
- Custom entries - for example, I can easily spin through the ApexClass sobjects and figure out how many aren’t using ‘with sharing’. Security isn’t just about configuration, it’s also about code!
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