Tag Archives: Salt

Secret Management with HashiCorp Vault

Post Syndicated from Mitz Amano original https://blog.cloudflare.com/secret-management-with-hashicorp-vault/

Secret Management with HashiCorp Vault

Secret Management with HashiCorp Vault

Many applications these days require authentication to external systems with resources, such as users and passwords to access databases and service accounts to access cloud services, and so on. In such cases, private information, like passwords and keys, becomes necessary. It is essential to take extra care in managing such sensitive data. For example, if you write your AWS key information or password in a script for deployment and then push it to a Git repository, all users who can read it will also be able to access it, and you could be in trouble. Even if it’s an internal repository, you run the risk of a potential leak.

How we were managing secrets in the service

Before we talk about Vault, let’s take a look at how we’ve used to manage secrets.

Salt

We use SaltStack as a bare-metal configuration management tool. The core of the Salt ecosystem consists of two major components: the Salt Master and the Salt Minion. The configuration state is owned by Salt Master, and thousands of Salt Minions automatically install packages, generate configuration files, and start services to the node based on the state. The state may contain secrets, such as passwords and API keys. When we deploy secrets to the node, we encrypt plaintext using a Salt Master owned GPG key and fill an ASCII-armored secret into the state file. Once it is applied, the Salt Master decrypts the PGP message using its own key, then the Salt Minion retrieves rendered data from the Master.

Secret Management with HashiCorp Vault

Kubernetes

We were using Lockbox, a secure way to store your Kubernetes secrets offline. The secret is asymmetrically encrypted and can only be decrypted with the Lockbox Kubernetes controller. The controller synchronizes with Secret objects. A Secret generated from Lockbox will also be created in the corresponding namespace. Since namespaces have been assigned administrator privileges by each engineering team, ordinary users cannot read Secret objects.

Secret Management with HashiCorp Vault

Why these secrets management were insufficient

Prior to Vault, GnuPG and Lockbox were used in this way to encrypt and decrypt most secrets in the data center. Nevertheless, they were inadequate in certain cases:

  • Lack of scoping secrets: The secret data in ASCII-armor could only be decrypted by a specific node when the client read it. This was still not enough control. Salt owns a GPG key for each Salt Master, and Core services (k8s, Databases, Storage, Logging, Tracing, Monitoring, etc) are deployed to hundreds of Salt Minions by a few Salt Masters. Nodes are often reused as different services after repairing hardware failure, so we use the same GPG key to decrypt the secrets of various services. Therefore, having a GPG key for each service is complicated. Also, a specific secret is used only for a specific service. For example, an access key for object storage is needed to back up the repository. In previous configurations, the API key is decrypted by a common Salt Master, so there is a risk that the API key will be referenced by another service or for another purpose. It is impossible to scope secret access, as long as we use the same GPG key.

    Another case is Kubernetes. Namespace-scoped access control and API access restrictions by the RBAC model are excellent. And the etcd used by Kubernetes as storage is not encrypted by default, and the Secret object is also saved. We need to think about encryption-at-rest by a third party KMS, or how to prevent Secrets from being stored in etcd. In other words, it is also required to properly control access to the secret for the secret itself.

  • Rotation and static secret: Anyone who has access to the Salt Master GPG key can theoretically decrypt all current and future secrets. And as long as we have many secrets, it’s impossible to rotate the encryption of all the secrets. Current and future secret management requires a process for easy rotation and using dynamically generated secrets instead.
  • Session management: Users/Services with GPG keys can decrypt secrets at any time. So GPG secret decryption is like having no TTL. (You can set an expiration date against the GPG key, but it’s just metadata. If you try to encrypt a new secret, after the expiration date, you’ll get a warning, but you can decrypt the existing secret). A temporary session is required to limit access when not needed.
  • Audit: GPG doesn’t have a way to keep an audit trail. Audit trails help us to trace the event who/when/where read secrets. The audit trail should contain details including the date, time, and user information associated with the secret read (and login), which is required regardless of user or service.

HashiCorp Vault

Armed with our set of requirements, we chose HashiCorp Vault to make better secret management with a better security model.

  • Scoping secrets: When a client logs in, a Vault token is generated through the Auth method (backend). This token has a policy that defines access policies, so it is clear what the client can access the data after logging in.
  • Rotation and dynamic secret: Version-controlled static secret with KV V2 Secret Engine helps us to easily update/rollback secrets with a single request. In addition, dynamic secrets and credentials are available to eliminate manual rotation. Ideally, these are required to be short-lived and have frequent rotation. Service should have restricted access. These are essential to reduce the impact of an attack, but they are operationally difficult, and it is impossible to satisfy them without automation. Vault can solve this problem by allowing operators to provide dynamically generated credentials to their services. Vault manages the credential lifecycle and rotates and revokes it as needed.
  • Session management: Vault provides a login process to get the token and various auth methods are provided. It is possible to link with an Identity Provider and authenticate using JWT. Since the vault token has a TTL, it can be managed as a short-lived credential to access secrets.
  • Audit: Vault supports audit that records who accessed which Vault API, when, and from where.

We also built Vault clusters for HA, Reliability, and handling large numbers of requests.

  • Use Integrated Storage that every node in the Vault cluster has a duplicate copy of Vault’s data. A client can retrieve the same result from any node.
  • Performance Replication offers us the same result as any Vault clusters.
  • Requests from clients are routed from a single Service IP to one of the Clusters. Anycast routes incoming traffic to the nearest cluster that handles requests efficiently. If one cluster goes down, the request will be automatically routed to another available cluster.
Secret Management with HashiCorp Vault

Service integrations

Use the appropriate Auth backend and Secret Engine to integrate the Service and Vault that are responsible for each core component.

Salt

The configuration state is owned by Salt Master, and hundreds of Salt Minions automatically install packages, generate configuration files, and start services to the node based on the role. The state data may contain secrets, such as API keys, and Salt Minion retrieves them from Vault. Salt uses a JWT signed by the Salt Master to log in to the vault using the JWT Auth method.

Secret Management with HashiCorp Vault

Kubernetes

Kubernetes reads Vault secrets through an operator that synchronizes with Secret objects. The Kubernetes Auth method uses the Service Account token JWT to login, just like the JWT Auth method. This JWT contains the service account name, UID, and namespace. Vault can scope namespace based on dynamic policy.

Secret Management with HashiCorp Vault

Identity Provider – User login

Additionally, Vault can work with the Identity Provider through a delegated authorization method based on OAuth 2.0 so that users can get tokens with the right policies. The JWT issued by the Identity Provider contains the group or user ID to which it belongs, and this metadata can be used to assign a Vault policy.

Secret Management with HashiCorp Vault

Integrated ecosystem – Auth x Secret

Vault provides a plugin system for two major components: authentication (Auth method) and secret management (Secret Engine). Vault can enable the officially provided plugins and the custom plugins you can build. The Auth method provides authentication for obtaining a Vault token by various methods. As mentioned in the service integration example above, we mainly use JWT, OIDC, and Kubernetes for login. On the other hand, the secret engine provides secrets in various ways, such as KV for a static secret, PKI for certificate signing, issuing, etc.

And they have an ecosystem. Vault can easily integrate auth methods and secret engines with each other. For instance, if we add a DB dynamic credential secret engine, all existing platforms will instantly be supported, without needing to reinvent the wheel, on how they will auth to a separate service. Similarly, we can add a platform into the mix, and it would instantly have access to all the existing secret engines and their functionalities. Additionally, the Vault can perform permission to the arbitrary endpoint path provided by secret engines based on the authentication method and policies.

Wrap up

Vault integration for the core component is already ongoing and many GPG secrets have been migrated to Vault. We aim to make service integrations in our data centers, dynamic credentials, and improve CI/CD for Vault. Interested? We’re hiring for security platform engineering!