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Secrets Management

Problems with the status quo

Some secrets are currently generated via scripts, others by hand. Operators also don’t have an up-to-date list of secrets and how to generate them.

For storage, operators store secrets for BOSH and Concourse as variable files. Operators pull down secrets from S3 locally to update Concourse pipelines. Operators also have Concourse pull down secrets as pipeline tasks to use with BOSH interpolate. Because of these manual processes, secrets are duplicated to multiple locations, e.g. Concourse credential files and BOSH secrets, and have to be kept in-sync.

Goals for secrets management

Goals the cloud.gov team wants in a secrets management solution:

  • Single source of truth for each secret.
  • BOSH and Concourse can read from same secret store.
  • Secrets are programmatically generated where possible.
  • Secrets are programmatically rotated where possible.

Proposed Approach

The proposed approach is it to use CredHub. The cloud.gov team has several reasons to choose CredHub over other secrets management services.

  • Integrates with BOSH (via config server API) and Concourse.
  • Supports credential generation and rotation.
  • De-facto standard for Pivotal products.

Proposed Architecture

The cloud.gov operations team is proposing to leverage BOSH + CredHub co-location.

The strategy suggested by the CredHub maintainers is to leverage co-located CredHub deployments with BOSH and to not allow BOSH directors to communicate with a shared CredHub instance. This means that cloud.gov operators will be moving forward with a CredHub co-located deployment within each BOSH director.

The cloud.gov operations team will begin importing existing secrets into CredHub and removing BOSH vars files from the interpolate commands in the current BOSH deployment pipelines.

BOSH and CredHub co-location

This strategy co-locates a CredHub within the BOSH virtual machine per environment. This solution means that CredHub would have a single database that it would leverage to store its data for its specific BOSH director.

graph TB; master[Master BOSH + CredHub] tooling[Tooling BOSH + CredHub] development[BOSH + CredHub] staging[BOSH + CredHub] production[BOSH + CredHub] tooling-d[Deployments] production-d[Deployments] staging-d[Deployments] development-d[Deployments] subgraph Tooling VPC master-->|Interpolates from Master CredHub|tooling tooling-->|Interpolates from Tooling CredHub|tooling-d end subgraph Production VPC tooling---->production subgraph Production BOSH production end production-->|Interpolates from Production CredHub|production-d end subgraph Staging VPC tooling---->staging subgraph Staging BOSH staging end staging-->|Interpolates from Staging CredHub|staging-d end subgraph Development VPC tooling---->development subgraph Development BOSH development end development-->|Interpolates from Development CredHub|development-d end

Pros

  • Co-located BOSH and CredHub
  • BOSH deployments within this director can read from CredHub.
  • Namespacing is simpler, less state to encode into BOSH deployments
    • For example, you don’t need to name the BOSH deployment and credentials would exist only for their own environment.
  • Risk of failure or comprise is distributed.
  • It’s a common pattern (especially in the exemplar of BUCC)

Cons

  • Co-location with BOSH would require maintenance of multiple CredHub deployments and databases for each BOSH director the cloud.gov operations team deploys
    • This includes backup strategies for each of these CredHub deployments.
  • Maintenance heavy, multiple deployments to update/fail.
  • Propagating common secrets across deployments would still be a manual process
    • e.g. The root bosh_ca_cert for every deployment of CredHub.
  • Doesn’t solve for Concourse being in the Tooling VPC but deploying to other VPCs and needing credentials from each environment’s VPC.
    • e.g. Concourse deploys to tooling, development, staging, production VPC
  • Concourse can only speak to a single API endpoint of CredHub.

General CredHub, Concourse, BOSH concerns

The following pros and cons are based on general concerns related to BOSH, Concourse, and CredHub.

Pros

  • CredHub managing secrets alleviates developer headaches around secrets generate, rotation, and storage.
  • There would be a single interface for secrets management for BOSH deployments using the credhub-cli.
  • cloud.gov operators can create documented process, automation, and tooling around importing, setting, generating, and rotating credentials.

Cons

  • Concourse uses paths that are different from BOSH paths, or arbitrary paths cloud.gov operators can define, with no desire to change this functionality.
    • BOSH paths: /$director/$deployment/$secret or absolute path.
    • Concourse paths: /$team/$pipeline/$secret; $team/$secret; no absolute path.
      • Closed pull-request: https://github.com/concourse/atc/pull/273

Bootstrapping CredHub

Deploying anything before there is a CredHub available on the BOSH director you’re deploying to requires you to deploy CredHub manually using established operations and variables files that leverage BOSH interpolate.

Generating import file

To ease the import of secrets into a fresh deployment of CredHub, take the common/secrets.yml file run it through Pivotal’s vars-to-credhub tool.

Note that vars-to-credhub only supports valid CredHub variable types. If the tool errors on the YAML structure of the secrets file, refer to the documentation below on CredHub variable types

Get the name from the BOSH director using bosh environment.

$ bosh environment --tty | grep Name | awk '{ print $2 }'

Get the name of the deployments available in BOSH by using bosh deployments.

bosh deployments --column=Name
prefix="/${bosh-director-name}/${bosh-deployment-name}";
vars-to-credhub \
  --prefix "${prefix}" \
  --vars-file tmp/path-to/common-secrets-file.yml > \
credhub-import-${bosh-director-name}-${bosh-deployment-name}.yml

cloud.gov operators inspect the credhub-import-* file for types and names that are referenced in BOSH operation files, BOSH variable files, or upstream manifest partials. Keep in mind names that are not prefixed by a forward-slash / will be converted by BOSH before being looked up in CredHub with a prefix of /${bosh-director-name}/${bosh-deployment-name}/.

To transfer the file from a cloud.gov operator’s local machine to a jumpbox, cloud.gov operators leverage the s3://cloud-gov-varz bucket to temporary upload credhub-import-* files to be downloaded from within a jumpbox using the cloud.gov operator’s AWS credentials using ephemeral environmental variables using the aws-cli.

aws s3 cp tmp/credhub-import-file.yml s3://cloud-gov-varz/credhub-import-file.yml --sse AES256

cloud.gov operators ensure that these credentials are not saved on the jumpbox nor in the shell’s history by preceding the commands with a single space ` ` to prevent it being saved in history.

 AWS_DEFAULT_REGION=us-gov-west-1 \
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=${operator-access-key-id} \
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY= ${operator-secret-access-key} \
aws s3 cp s3://cloud-gov-varz/credhub-import-file.yml tmp/credhub-import-file.yml

With the file locally in the jumpbox, you can then import it using the credhub-cli.

credhub import \
  -f credhub-import-${bosh-director-name}-${bosh-deployment-name}.yml

Once this file is successfully imported into CredHub, cloud.gov operators will delete the credhub-import-* file from the s3://cloud-gov-varz/ bucket.

aws s3 rm s3://cloud-gov-varz/credhub-import-file.yml

CredHub variable types

CredHub only supports specific types. If a cloud.gov operator needs to store a different type of credential, such as an array. It’s required to modify the structure of the manifest using an opsfile and storing the key of the array in the CredHub database. An generic example is described below:

  - name: nfstestserver
    release: nfs-volume
    properties:
      nfstestserver:
        # value stored in secrets file as an array
        export_volumes: ((nfstestserver-volumes))

Modify the manifest using an opsfile so that the secret included the export_volumes property in the value.

  - name: nfstestserver
    release: nfs-volume
    properties:
      nfstestserver: ((nfstestserver-volumes))

This credential will then be stored in CredHub as a JSON type.

credhub set \
  -n /bosh/deploy/nfstestserver-volumes \
  -t json \
  -v '{ "export_volumes": [ "val1", "val2" ] }'

When it is retrieved from CredHub it will be a YAML array with a key of export_volumes.

Handling dependencies among deployments with CredHub

With a co-located CredHub for every BOSH director, different deployments within the same BOSH director may not run into namespacing issues requiring different variable files to update manifests across environments. It is possible though that there will be issues with credentials that flow through various deployments.

A prime example of a dependency across deployments are Cloud Foundry UAA clients defined in the deployment of Cloud Foundry in each environment. These deployments normally do not have a prefix / slash in their name. This means that they would be looked up in CredHub by the BOSH director adding a prefix of /${director}/${deployment}/${variable-name}. See the documentation here.

This means for the cloud.gov Cloud Foundry deployments, there would be three different variable look ups in each respective CredHub deployment for variables without a prefix which requires different variable files for each environment cloud.gov operators deploy:

/bosh/cf-development/cdn-broker-client-secret
/bosh/cf-staging/cdn-broker-client-secret
/bosh/cf-production/cdn-broker-client-secret

In order to avoid the need to create variable files for deployments in different environments, the cloud.gov operations team will leverage custom absolute paths for dependencies across different deployments. This requires manifests to be modified from their previous variable names without a prefix / slash to the new customer absolute path.

/cf/clients/cdn-broker-client-secret

This custom absolute path is best described as:

/${generalized-deployment-name}/${type}/${original-secret-name}`
  • ${generalized-deployment-name} would be the name of the BOSH deployment without an environment.
  • ${type} would be the type of credential respective of the deployment name, e.g. clients for a Cloud Foundry deployment.
  • ${original-secret-name} would be the original name of the secret being moved over to this custom absolute path.

The ${generalized-deployment-name} should be named after the producer of the secret, e.g. where the secret is set or configured. In the case of Cloud Foundry UAA client secrets, it’s the cf deployment name. Consumers of the credential should never be considered for the ${generalized-deployment-name}. In order to create a custom absolute path for a credential, cloud.gov operators must understand the consumer/producer relationship of the dependencies of the software they’re deploying.

Deploying services before CredHub credentials exist

To Be Decided

Rotating secrets

To Be Decided

cloud.gov Operator Tooling

To Be Decided

  • https://docs.cloudfoundry.org/credhub/
  • https://concourse-ci.org/creds.html#credhub

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