Hands-on with Vault on Kubernetes

This is the preamble for a hands-on workshop on Vault, a single binary secrets management system, to build a secrets management system for a production Kubernetes environment from scratch.

Initially presented at OSCON 2019.

Transcript

1. © 2018 HashiCorp Hands-on with Vault on Kubernetes O’Reilly OSCON July 16, 2019 1
2. ▪ Anubhav Mishra (@build1point0) ▪ Rosemary Wang (@joatmon08) ▪ Developer Advocates from HashiCorp Your Facilitators 2
3. ▪ Explain why Vault on Kubernetes ▪ Deploy a Vault cluster on Kubernetes. – Set up for high availability – Demonstrate (some) production hardening approaches ▪ Retrieve secrets from Vault for an application. – Dynamic retrieval – Native Kubernetes integrations Objectives 3
4. © 2018 HashiCorp A Quick Introduction: Kubernetes 4
5. Orchestrates, organizes, and manages containers. ▪ Resource Definitions extend the Kubernetes API ▪ Definitions specified in JSON or YAML ▪ Consists of master and node architecture What is Kubernetes? 5
6. Architecture 6
7. Pods are grouping of containers, volumes, and networking. Deployment maintains the desired number of application pods. StatefulSet provides sticky identity for pods that require some preservation of state. DaemonSet deploys a pod per node. Useful Constructs 7
8. Encoded but stored in plaintext, with little access control or management. Need a secrets manager. Options include: ▪ Public Cloud Key Management Service ▪ HashiCorp Vault Kubernetes Secrets 8
9. © 2018 HashiCorp A Quick Introduction: Vault 9
10. Manages secrets & protect sensitive data. ▪ Secure, store, and control access ▪ For tokens, passwords, certificates, and encryption keys ▪ Has a UI, CLI, and HTTP API What is Vault? 10
12. ▪ Alternative to plaintext secrets ▪ Distributed ▪ Declarative policies for access control ▪ Eases Vault cluster lifecycle management ▪ Manages secrets lifecycle (rotation, revocation) ▪ Can be sidecar for application (lower latency) Why on Kubernetes? 12
13. ▪ Multi-tenancy? ▪ Container security measures? ▪ Manual vs. Automation Consider... 13
14. © 2018 HashiCorp Important Vault Concepts 14
15. ▪ Secret is anything used for authentication and authorization – Tokens – Passwords – Certificates ▪ Sensitive is anything that is confidential – SSN, Credit Card, Email, PII, etc Secret 15
16. When starting, Vault is sealed. ▪ This keeps data encrypted with a master key. ▪ It’s split into shards using Shamir’s Secret Sharing algorithm. Seal 16
17. To retrieve secrets, we need to unseal Vault. ▪ This means reconstructing the master key. ▪ Needs enough shards in order to properly unseal. Unseal 17
18. We mitigate the attack surface with ephemerality. ▪ Data has Time to Live (TTL), listed in a lease. ▪ After TTL has expired… – Lessee must renew – OR Vault automatically revokes by invalidating secret Lease, Renew, & Revoke 18
19. Authenticates an identity. ▪ Can have dynamic tokens created from auth methods. ▪ One or more policies can be attached to tokens. ▪ There is a root token, the one token to rule them all. USE WITH CAUTION. Tokens 19
20. Declaratively grants or forbids access to paths and operations. Policies path "secret/*" { capabilities = ["create", "read", "update", "delete", "list"] } 20
21. © 2018 HashiCorp Getting Started 21
22. Material is mostly cloud provider agnostic. ▪ Need easy way to get (larger) Kubernetes clusters ▪ Variations in workstations = tough for workshops ▪ Auto-unseal requires key management service Credit to Seth Vargo’s workshop for Vault on GKE. Why are we using GCP? 22
23. Patterns in this workshop can be extended or dismissed. The material in this workshop requires additional work for complete production hardening (like process for revoking the root token.) Disclaimer 23
24. Go to https://console.cloud.google.com ▪ Google Cloud Platform account? ▪ Project with Owner access? ▪ Google Cloud Shell? Pre-Flight Checklist 24
25. © 2018 HashiCorp Workshop 25
26. hashi.co/oscon-workshop (Instructions in README.md.) Repository 26
28. © 2018 HashiCorp Thank you! Mishra (@build1point0) & Rosemary (@joatmon08) https://github.com/hashicorp/hands-on-with-vault-on-kubernetes 28