Security for NeMo Helix

This page provides security guidelines and best practices for deploying and managing NeMo Helix in production environments.

Security Considerations

The NeMo Helix does not impose rate limits. You must implement a rate-limiting strategy to restrict access to your application.
The NeMo Helix does not have an internal notion of a user. To restrict authorization to specific endpoints or users, implement an external mechanism such as an Envoy proxy.
The NeMo Data Store microservice does not provide object-class-specific access controls. All items reside within a single access control boundary.
The NeMo Helix, by design, can access all content in the NeMo Data Store microservice, including LoRA adapters, training data, evaluation data, and evaluation results. This access is required for model evaluation. Carefully weigh the risk of data exposure from serving customized models directly to production against the overhead of a separate deployment.
The NeMo Helix is not intended to be internet-facing. Deploy it as the logic (middle) tier in a three-tier architecture.
You are responsible for securing access to any application using the microservices. This includes:
Implementing an authentication layer between users and your application
Applying required authorization controls
Securing communication between services in your application

Refer to the NVIDIA Product Security page for information about subscribing to bulletins and updates, managing vulnerabilities, and reporting vulnerabilities.

Default Network Ports

The following table lists the network ports that the NeMo Helix Helm Chart opens with the default values. All of them are cluster-internal (ClusterIP) services. You can override these port numbers during deployment.

Network Port	Service	Helm value
8080/TCP	NeMo Helix API	`api.service.port`
8080/TCP	NeMo Helix core controller (headless service)	`core.controller.service.port`

By default, the NeMo Helix Helm Chart also deploys the following databases. Alternatively, you can disable each one and use an external database during installation (externalDatabase, externalClickhouse).

Network Port	Database	Helm value
5432/TCP	PostgreSQL (`postgresql.enabled`)	`postgresql.service.port`
8123/TCP	ClickHouse HTTP interface (`clickhouse.enabled`)	`clickhouse.service.httpPort`
9000/TCP	ClickHouse native protocol (`clickhouse.enabled`)	`clickhouse.service.nativePort`

The NeMo Helix Helm Chart does not install an OpenTelemetry collector or a Milvus instance. To export traces and metrics, point telemetry.OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT at a collector that you run; refer to Observability. For NeMo Helix Evals retrieval and RAG evaluations, connect an existing Milvus instance; refer to Milvus.