Rotating Secrets I

Introduction

This guide assumes that you’re following the Offboarding Checklist found here and removed direct access to cloud.gov AWS accounts. The following guide walks a cloud.gov operator through rotating all sensitive information (secrets).

Please familiarize yourself with secret key management. You will be touching various parts of the platform from soup to nuts. Remember you have support from the entire team and it is helpful to coordinate with cloud.gov operators in case they are working on a particular piece of software that will requires a secrets rotation.

Rotate Access

It’s important that you rotate access to the platform first. This can be categorized with three different types of secrets.

Rotate secrets passphrases

Create a new temporary directory as a workspace for all the secrets file(s) for any deployments which contain resources of type common and with names starting with common-*.

mkdir rotate-all-passphrases

After creating the directory, make sure you have authenticated with Concourse using fly login. Change into the temporary directory and run the following command to loop through all the pipelines and create a all-secrets-list text file with the current state of all cg-common resources matching a name that starts with common-*.

Downloading all pipelines and cg-common resources

Leverage the Concourse Credentials bucket to update secrets passphrases. You can verify generate a list of all passphrases that need to be updated by querying Concourse. Though, every pipeline’s credentials.yml must be updated and uploaded from that bucket in order to sync work across team members.

Gather a list of all the pipelines currently deployed from Concourse.

fly --target fr pipelines | grep -Eo '^[a-z0-9\-]+'

Match this audit of active pipelines with those from Concourse credentials.

aws s3 ls s3://concourse-credentials/

Names found in the S3 bucket reference the name of the GitHub repository so it is necessary to add a prefix of cg- to the pipelines returned from fly pipelines.

Reviewing the cg-common resources file

Now open the all-secrets-list.txt file in a text editor. You will be using this file to create the following sets of commands to perform the secrets passphrase rotation.

Get the pipeline and source information for cg-common resources.
Download Concourse credentials in order to fly the new pipeline
Download the encrypted secrets file(s) using the source information.
Decrypt the secrets file(s) using the secrets_passphrase.
Generate a new secrets_passphrase using $CG_SCRIPTS/generate-passphrase.
Encrypt the secrets file(s) using the generated secrets_passphrase.
Edit the downloaded completed pipeline using sed to replace the previous secrets_passphrase with the current secrets_passphrase.
Set the pipeline using the edited Concourse credentials, verify that the secrets_passphrase are being updated in the pipeline.
Upload Concourse credentials to the appropriate file path in the Concourse credentials bucket.
Upload the encrypted secrets file(s).

Running through the steps above using boilerplate

Please reference secret key management for more information on what $CG_PIPELINE/decrypt.sh and $CG_PIPELINE/encrypt.sh are doing in the example below.

# Download secrets file.
aws s3 cp \
s3://${bucket_name}/${secrets_file}.yml \
${secrets_file}.yml.enc;

# Decrypt secrets file.
INPUT_FILE=${secrets_file}.yml.enc \
OUTPUT_FILE=${secrets_file}.yml \
PASSPHRASE="${old_passphrase}" \
$CG_PIPELINE/decrypt.sh;

# Encrypt secrets file with newly generated passphrase.
INPUT_FILE=${secrets_file}.yml \
OUTPUT_FILE=${secrets_file}.yml.enc \
PASSPHRASE="${new_passphrase}" \
$CG_PIPELINE/encrypt.sh;

# Edit the downloaded pipeline and replace the old_passphrase with the new_passphrase.
sed -i -- 's/old_passphrase/new_passphrase/' credentials.yml;

# Set the pipeline with the newly updated properties ( the diff only shows the secrets_passphrases being updated ).
fly --target fr \
set-pipeline \
--pipeline ${deploy_pipeline_name} \
--config=pipeline.yml;
--load-vars-from=credentials.yml;

# Upload the secrets file.
aws s3 cp \
--sse AES256 \
${secrets_file}.yml.enc \
s3://${bucket_name}/${secrets_file}.yml;

Rotate CF deployment users

Some of our Concourse pipelines deploy to Cloud Foundry using cloud.gov service account deployers. In order to rotate these, you need to target the correct org and space in order to create the cloud.gov service deployer account instance.

Auditing all CF deployment users

Use the get-all-cf-deployers.sh file in the cg-scripts repository to audit all of the CF users deploying to all environments using Concourse.

The script outputs the login commands for all matching environments for both the deployer account and for operators using --sso. It’s useful to run this command redirect the output to a file for the next steps.

When rotating these accounts, you need ensure you don’t delete the previous deployer service instance until after the credentials have been successfully used in a deployment in order to minimize downtime.

Steps for rotating cloud.gov Service Account deployers

Make sure that cloud.gov Service Account users are only used for basic cf push deployments. If you’re deploying service brokers, read the Rotate Secrets V CF external secrets section.

Target the appropriate org and space in the current environment.
Check the services, if one exists for this deployer renamed it with a _prev suffix for later deletion.
- cf rename-service ${name_of_deployer} ${name_of_deployer}_prev
Create a new service instance.
- cf create-service cloud-gov-service-account space-deployer "${name_of_deployer}"
Read the service instance details for the deployer.
- cf service "${name_of_deployer}"
Open the Fugacious link and save the credentials locally in the credentials.yml
- cf service ${name_of_deployer} | grep Dashboard | awk '{ print $2 }'
Refly the pipeline with updated credentials and start a new job.
Delete the ${name_of_deployer}_prev service account deployer.
- cf delete-service ${name_of_deployer}_prev -f