This is a technical question on comprehension:
When I want a cloud server (e.g. GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, or GitLab CI/CD) to build and publish an app to any of the app stores ... isn't it necessary then that I upload my private key to these servers' key vault, so they can sign my app on my behalf?
Isn't that concept a bit risky?
I mean, I was taught to let my private keys never leave my machines.
What if I accidentally misconfigure the security settings on the uploaded key? What if some black hat gets hold of the key and abuses it? I mean, with each build process, the private key is getting copied from the vault to the build runner, usually residing somewhere else.
What are the techniques used to ensure that private keys are kept safely on a public server? Is there an official audit performed on these departments?
Should I rather use different Authenticode certificates for each of the above providers? Or will a single certificate be resilient enough?
I couldn't find a technical discussion on this question, only marketing docs. Has this security concern been scientifically scrutinized?
It is safe to use certificates in Azure DevOps, Azure DevOps encrypts the certificate and then uses it in the build pipeline.
We could use Azure Key Vault to protect encryption keys and secrets like certificates, connection strings, and passwords in the cloud. You could refer this doc for more details.
We could also save the certificate file in the Library->Secure Files, if someone want to access or use it, he need enough permission.
I found some sample to use certificate in the Azure DevOps Service, you could check it.
If you are using SSL certificate thumbprint, you could save it in the variable and then set the variable to Secret via the “lock” icon at the end of the row.
If you are using PFX certificate, you could refer to this doc.
Update1
GitHub action
We could save the certificate here in the GitHub, GitHub also encrypts the certificate, we could not get the value after save the variable in the Secrets, and we will get *** when print the Secrets value in the log.
We plan to use client-side field-level encryption for some confidential fields in our product. To generate and manage the Customer Master key, we want to use Hashicorp Vault. KMS providers currently supported are only: Amazon Web Services KMS and Locally Managed Keyfile.
To work with Hashicorp Vault, it seems, we need to choose Locally Managed Keyfile as the KMS provider. This means that the Master key will be fetched from Vault in memory and then used in the code to encrypt/decrypt the DEK (Data Encryption Key). Ideally, the decryption of DEK should happen in the vault itself as a best practice, and master key should not be brought out of Vault.
Is there a way to achieve this? There are numerous articles around encryption at rest and integration with Hashicorp vault, but none of them is for CSFLE. Need help if anyone is using CSFLE.
Thanks
We have installed and configured Hashicorp Vault AppRole authentication for one server, by storing the role_id and secret_id in a local file on the server, and we're able to have code on the server read the values from file, authenticate to Vault, receive a token and then read the secrets it needs from Vault. So far so good. However, the secret_id expires after 31 days, and so the process fails.
I've read up on the concepts of using AppRoles, and they seem like the perfect fit for our use case, but for this expiration. We don't want to have to re-generate the secret_id every month.
From what I've read, if you create the role without setting secret_id_ttl it should be non-expiring, but that isn't the case. This may be due to how the AppRole auth method is configured, but I haven't seen anything solid on this.
So I found an article on the Hashicorp website where AppRoles are discussed in detail. The article gives good arguments for expiring secret_id's in a CI/CD environment, even illustrating how this works in 8 simple steps. I understand how this works, but the article fails to mention how the CI/CD and Orchestrator systems themselves are authenticated to Vault? Or am I missing something?
In the end, I want to have the secret_id not expire. Ever.
Without additional support from your environment you will have to write some logic in your installer, and have a service manager of some sort to start your services. In many cloud environments, you may already have the equivalent entities (Terraform, Cloud Formation, etc.) and you should leverage their secrets management capabilities where needed.
For custom installations, here is a workflow that I have used.
Have an installation manager process that can be invoked to perform installation / upgrade. Make sure installation / upgrade of services is always through this process.
Have a service manager process that is responsible for starting individual services and monitoring them / restarting them. Make sure service start-ups are always via this service manager.
During installation, generate self-signed certificates for Vault, installation manager and service manager. Vault certificates should trust the certs for the installation manager and the service manager. Store these with limited permission (600) in directories owned by the installation user or the service manager user as the case may be. Set up certificate-based authentication in Vault using these certs.
These credentials should have limited capabilities associated with them. The installation manager should only be able to create new roles and not delete anything. The service manager should only be able to create secrets for the named roles created by the installation manager, and delete nothing.
During installation / upgrade, the installation manager should connect to Vault and create all necessary service-specific roles. It should also be able to set role ids for individual services in per-service config files that the services may read on start-up.
During each service's start-up, the service manager should connect to Vault and create secret ids corresponding to each service's role. It should set the secret id in an environment variable and start the service. The secret id should have time-bound validity (by setting TTLs) so that they cannot be used for much beyond the creation of the auth token (see #7).
Each service should read the role id from the config file, and the secret id from the environment variable. It should then generate the auth token using these two, and use the token to authenticate itself with vault for its lifetime.
It is possible to create a Vault AppRole with a secret_id that essentially never expires. However, this should be limited to use on a Vault development server -- one that does not contain any production credentials -- and for use in a development environment.
That being said, here's the procedure I used based on several articles in the Vault documentation, but primarily AppRole Pull Authentication.
This assumes that the Vault approle authentication method is already installed at approle/ and that you are logged in to Vault, have root or admin privileges on the Vault server and have a valid, non-expired token.
Note: For the values supplied for the fields below, the maximum value that vault seems to accept is 999,999,999. For the TTL fields, that is the number of seconds which comes out to more than 31 years. That's not forever, but it is long enough that renewing the secret_id will probably be somebody else's problem (SEP).
# Vault server address to be used by the Vault CLI.
export VAULT_ADDR="https://vault-dev.example.com:8200/"
# Vault namespace to be used by the CLI.
# Required for Cloud and Enterprise editions
# Not applicable for Open Source edition
export VAULT_NAMESPACE="admin"
# The name of the Vault AppRole
export VAULT_ROLE=my-approle
# Override defaults on the approle authentication method
# NOTE: In this command, the field names, default-lease-ttl
# and max-lease-ttl contain dashes ('-'), NOT
# underscores ('_'), and are preceded by a single
# dash ('-').
vault auth tune \
-default-lease-ttl=999999999 \
-max-lease-ttl=999999999 approle/
# Override defaults on the approle
# NOTE: In this command, the field names, secret_id_ttl and
# secret_id_num contain underscores ('_'), NOT
# dashes ('-'), and are NOT preceded by a single
# dash ('-').
vault write auth/approle/role/my-approle \
secret_id_ttl=999999999 \
secret_id_num_uses=999999999
# Create a new secret_id for the approle which uses the new defaults
vault write -f auth/approle/role/my-approle/secret-id
Update the server config file to use the new secret_id and you are ready to go.
As the OP has noted, the Hashicorp Vault documentation assumes that the application is able to authenticate, somehow, to the vault and then retrieve the secret ID (possibly wrapped) from the vault and then, use that to authenticate and fetch a token used to actually work with secrets. The answers here are posing alternative approaches to retrieving that initial token.
Alan Thatcher wrote a blog article, Vault AppRole Authentication, that provides another well thought out approach:
Create a policy that allows the user to retrieve the secret-id and role-id, but nothing else.
Create a long lived, periodic/renewable token based on that policy.
Store the long lived token securely, e.g. as a Kubernetes secret
At runtime, use the long-lived token to:
acquire the secret-id and role-id,
authenticate to vault using these and acquire short-lived token
use current short-lived token to work with secrets
For Java applications, the Spring Vault project supports this approach if you configure the long-lived token as the "initial token" and the approle authencation name, e.g. chef-ro in the blog case.
My personal feeling is that this approach is about as secure but a bit simpler than the mutual TLS approach. I agree that using an infinite TTL for the secret-id is a less secure practice for Production environments.
Thanks to Mr. Thatcher for thinking this one through.
This is probably not the canonnical answer, but I found it empty so decided to add some pointers.
As per Hashicorp Vault AppRole: role-id and secret-id:
Additional brownie information: Ideally, it's best practice to keep
the TTL low, 30 minutes max - if your application is stateful, or
maybe even less if it's a stateless application. The secret key of
Vault approle should also be rotated every 90 days. Please note by
default, Vault approle backend has 31 days of TTL, so if you want to
set it to 90 days, you need to increase TTL of the approle backend as
well.
However (in the same question):
You can generate secret-id with indefinite validity. But doing so will
be as good as keeping your secrets in the configuration file.
For ephemeral instances you can use configuration management to pass in secrets via a third (broker) role. With regard to a server that exists indefinitely, i'm still working that out...
Ideas:
TLS certificates might work well on Windows, don't know about Linux.
GitHub Personal Access Tokens, but this is not org. friendly.
Review the other auth methods available to see if there's one that fits your requirements (e.g. AWS).
We have a lot of user P12 files (certificates) for each clients/tenant and we would like to store it securely. We don't use cloud solution like Amazon, Azure Keyvault or other datacenter solution but a hosting company.
Do you have any solution ? Vault from Hashicorp
You can use Vault to manage your own PKI and issue certificates instead. In fact, it is more than that,
From using Hashicorp Vault to manage PKI and issue certificates
Vault allows you to manage an entire Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)
to ensure secure communication among different services. This allows
companies to easily setup their own certificate authority (CA), revoke
or issue new certificates using simple API calls, thus dumping the
painful process of constantly generating self-signed certificates.
You can checkout this guide for the process of using Vault to generate and issue certificates.
I want to secure my own HTTPS end point (node.js express.js server) with a certificate which I have deployed to the cluster (that is, it exists in Cert:\LocalMachine\My).
I of course want to avoid having my certificate in source control. I can't use an EndpointBindingPolicy in the ServiceManifest because as far as I'm aware that is just for http.sys(?) based systems, which this isn't.
What I thought is perhaps run a SetupEntryPoint script to:
grab the certificate from the store
export it as a pfx with a random passphrase (or some appropriate format)
copy it to {pkgroot}/certs/ssl_cert.pfx
replace some sort of token in serverinit.js with the random passphrase
This way the server, er, code base doesn't need to have the certificate present, i just needs to trust that it will be there when the service is run.
However I don't think I can do this, if it even is as sensible idea, as the certificates in the store are marked such that the private key is non-exportable! Or, at least, they are with my RDP account!
Is there a way to export the certificate with its private key?
What are my options here?
I ended up writing a powershell script which runs in my release pipeline, arguments are clientID, clientSecret and certificateName. clientSecret is stored as a protected environmental variable for my agent.
Create new application registration under same subscription as KeyVault (which should be same as SF Cluster) (e.g. in portal.azure.com)
Note down app ID
Create app secret
Modify KeyVault ACL with App as principal, set get only on secrets
use REST api with client ID and secret https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/keyvault/getsecret
I chose this over grabbing the certificate in the SetupEntryPoint, for example, as this hides the client secret better from the open world (e.g. developers who shouldn't/don't need access to it)