secrets-manager

A tool to keep your Kubernetes secrets in sync with Vault

Rationale

Lots of companies use Vault as their secrets store backend for multiple kind of secrets and different purposes. Kubernetes brings a nice secrets API, but it means that you have two different sources of truth for your secrets.

secrets-manager tries to solve this, by reading secrets from Vault and comparing them to Kubernetes secrets, creating and updating them as you do it in Vault.

How does it compare to other tools?

• cert-manager. cert-manager solves a different issue, automation around issuing and renewing certificates. It integrates with Let's Encrypt and Vault (using the pki backend) being those the certificates issuer. While this is really powerful and really a tool which is fully compatible with secrets-manager, it does not really sync a secret from a secret backend. secrets-manager is a more generic tool where you can sync certificates or any kind of secret from the source of truth of your secrets to Kubernetes secrets.

• vault-operator. This manages vault clusters in Kubernetes, so it is a completely different tool.

• vault-crd. This is the tool that really inspired secrets-manager. We opened this issue asking for token renewal or other login mechanism. While the author is very responsive answering, we could not wait for an implementation and since we were are more familiar with Go than Java we decided to write secrets-manager. We are very thankful to the author of vault-crd, since it has been really inspiring. Some differences:

  • vault-crd only supports Hashicorp Vault as its secrets manager, while secrets-manager has been designed to support other backends (we only support Vault for now, though).
  • vault-crd supports KV1, KV2 and PKI secret engines. secrets-manager supports KV1 and KV2. It is on our roadmap to support more secret engines.

How it works

secrets-manager will login to Vault using AppRole credentials and it will start a reconciliation loop watching for changes in SecretsDefinition objects. In background it will run two main operations:

• If Vault token is close to expire and if that's the case, renewing it. If it can't renew, it will try to re-login.
• It will re-queue SecretsDefinition events and in every event loop it will verify if the current Kubernetes secret it is in the desired state by comparing it with the data in Vault and creating/updating them accordingly

Custom Resource Definition (CRD)

secrets-manager now uses Custom Resource Definitions to extend Kubernetes APIs with a new SecretDefinition object that it will watch.

To install the CRD in your cluster: kubectl apply -f crd.yaml

Secrets Definition

• name: This will be the name of the secret created in Kubernetes.
• type: Kubernetes secret type. One of kubernetes.io/tls, Opaque.
• keysMap: This will contain the Kubernetes secret data keys as a map of datasources. Each datasource will contain the way to access the secret in the secret backend source of truth, via a path and a key. And optional encoding key can be provided if your secrets are codified in base64. The absence of encoding or encoding: text means no encoding.

NOTE: We let the user all the responsibility to set the whole Vault path. So it is important to know which path a secret engine needs to be set. For instance, with the KV version 1 all secrets are stored in secret/ whereas with the KV version 2, all secrets go under secret/data/

An example of a secretdefinition object

$ cat > secretdefinition-sample.yaml <<EOF
---
apiVersion: secrets-manager.tuenti.io/v1alpha1
kind: SecretDefinition
metadata:
  name: secretdefinition-sample
spec:
  # Add fields here
  name: supersecretnew
  keysMap:
    decoded:
      path: secret/data/pathtosecret1
      encoding: base64
      key: value
    raw:
      path: secret/data/pathtosecret1
      key: value

EOF

To deploy it just run kubectl apply -f secretdefinition-sample.yaml

Flags

Flag	Default	Description
backend	vault	Selected backend. Only vault supported for now
enable-debug-log	false	Enable this to get more logs verbosity and debug messages.
enable-leader-election	false	Enable leader election for controller manager. Enabling this will ensure there is only one active controller manager.
reconcile-period	5s	How often the controller will re-queue secretdefinition events
config.backend-timeout	5s	Backend connection timeout
vault.url	https://127.0.0.1:8200	Vault address. VAULT_ADDR environment would take precedence.
vault.role-id	""	Vault appRole role_id. VAULT_ROLE_ID environment would take precedence.
vault.secret-id	""	Vault appRole secret_id. VAULT_SECRET_ID environment would take precedence.
vault.engine	kv2	Vault secrets engine to use. Only key/value engines supported. Default is kv version 2
vault.auth-method	approle	Vault authentication method. Supported: approle, kubernetes.
vault.approle-path	approle	Vault approle login path
vault.kubernetes-path	kubernetes	Vault kubernetes login path
vault.kubernetes-role	""	Vault kubernetes role name
vault.max-token-ttl	300	Max seconds to consider a token expired.
vault.token-polling-period	15s	Polling interval to check token expiration time.
vault.renew-ttl-increment	600	TTL time for renewed token.
metrics-addr	:8080	The address to listen on for HTTP requests.
controller-name	SecretDefinition	If running secrets manager in multiple namespaces, set the controller name to something unique avoid 'duplicate metrics collector registration attempted' errors.
watch-namespaces	""	Comma separated list of namespaces that secrets-manager will watch for SecretDefinitions. By default all namespaces are watched.
exclude-namespaces	""	Comma separated list of namespaces that secrets-manager will not watch for SecretDefinitions. By default all namespaces are watched. Note that if you exclude and watch the same namespace, excluding it will be prioritized.

RBAC

Secrets Manager can be run in one of 2 ways:

• Global secrets management in all namespaces for the whole of a Kuberentes cluster
• Manage specific namespaces

In order for Secrets Manager to act as a manager for all Namespaces it requires a ClusterRole that enables it to manage all secrets and secretdefinitions in the entire Kubernetes cluster as in the config/rbac/role.yaml and config/rbac/rolebinding.yaml examples.

Alternatively if you use the watch-namespaces argument to limit secretdefinition monitoring to sepcific namespaces then you can just give the serviceAccount that secrets-manager is running as a standard role and a rolebinding in each of the namespaces that you want it to manage as shown in the config/rbac/secrets_manager_role.yaml and config/rbac/secrets_manager_role_binding.yaml examples. Alternatively you can still use a cluster role if you so wish.

To be able to interact with secretdefinition resources using the standard admin, edit and view Kubernetes native roles, you need to create the following ClusterRole aggregations:

• config/rbac/secretdefinitions_admin_clusterrole_aggregation.yaml
• config/rbac/secretdefinitions_view_clusterrole_aggregation.yaml

More information about aggregated ClusterRoles can be found at kubernetes.io > Using RBAC Authorization > Aggregated ClusterRoles.

Prometheus Metrics

secrets-manager exposes the following Prometheus metrics at http://$cfg.listen-addr/metrics:

Metric	Type	Description	Labels
secrets_manager_vault_max_token_ttl	Gauge	secrets-manager max Vault token TTL	"vault_address", "vault_engine", "vault_version", "vault_cluster_id", "vault_cluster_name"
secrets_manager_vault_token_ttl	Gauge	Vault token TTL	"vault_address", "vault_engine", "vault_version", "vault_cluster_id", "vault_cluster_name"
secrets_manager_vault_token_renewal_errors_total	Counter	Vault token renewal errors counter	"vault_address", "vault_engine", "vault_version", "vault_cluster_id", "vault_cluster_name", "vault_operation", "error"
secrets_manager_controller_secret_read_errors_total	Counter	Errors total count when reading a secret from Kubernetes	"name", "namespace"
secrets_manager_controller_sync_errors_total	Counter	Secrets synchronization total errors.	"name", "namespace"
secrets_manager_controller_last_sync_status	Gauge	The result of the last sync of a secret. 1 = OK, 0 = Error	"name", "namespace"

Getting Started with Vault

Vault Policies

We do recommend you use policies to make sure you grant secrets-manager only to those secrets you need available in your Kubernetes cluster. An example of simple policy could be:

path "secret/data/my-k8s-cluster/*" {
  capabilities = ["read"]
}

To create this policy:

$ cat > my-policy.hcl <<EOF
path "secret/data/my-k8s-cluster/*" {
  capabilities = ["read"]
}
EOF

$ cat my-policy.hcl | vault policy write my-policy -

Vault Tokens

Vault tokens will be renewed by secrets-manager if the ttl is lower than vault.max-token-ttl and the token is renewable. But as per Vault's documentation, regular tokens will have their own max TTL that it's calculated on every renewal, so that a token will eventually expire. This can be ok for your use case, but for others a periodic token could be much more convinient. In the case of a periodic token, the period will invalidate the vault.renew-ttl-increment option.

Vault AppRole

Vault token as a login mechanism has been deprecated in favor of the AppRole authentication method for secrets-manager. secrets-manager will still renew the token obtained after login in, but will make secrets-manager more resilient in case of a token has expired due to network issues, Vault sealed, etc.

So instead of expecting a token, secrets-manager expects a role_id and a secret_id to connect to Vault.

To create a role with a permanent secret_id attached to a policy:

$ vault write auth/approle/role/secrets-manager policies=my-policy secret_id_num_uses=0 secret_id_ttl=0

To get a secret_id:

$ vault write -force auth/approle/role/secrets-manager/secret-id

To get the role_id:

$ vault read auth/approle/role/secrets-manager/role-id

Vault Kubernetes Authentication

In addition to appRole, secrets-manager can authenticate to Vault using its own Kubernetes serviceAccount. Follow the Vault Kubernetes auth guide to enable it and configure it.

Example:

$ cat > secrets-manager-role.json <<EOF
{
  "bound_service_account_names": [ "secrets-manager" ],
  "bound_service_account_namespaces": [ "my-namesapace" ],
  "policies": [ "my-policy" ],
  "max_ttl": 3600
}
EOF

$ vault write auth/kubernetes/role/secrets-manager @secrets-manager-role.json

Versioning

Right now versioning it's a manually task. Depending on the kind of the update we would apply a major, minor or patch update given that we follow semantic versionin.

Before building release images, we should run one of the following commands:

• make update-major-version
• make update-minor-version
• make update-patch-version

Deployment

secrets-manager has been designed to be deployed in Kubernetes, you will find a full deployment example in the config/samples folder.

Credits & Contact

secrets-manager is developed and maintained by Tuenti Technologies S.L.

You can follow Tuenti engineering team on Twitter @tuentieng.

License

secrets-manager is available under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See LICENSE file for more info.