credo_manager 0.2.2

Manager for aws credentials

The python implementation of Credulous (https://github.com/realestate-com-au/credulous)

Essentially, it’s a credential management program written with amazon credentials in mind. It uses your ssh key pairs to keep your credentials encrypted on disk until you need to use them.

Installation

Install the dependencies:

Mac OSX

brew install libgit2 gmp

Linux

Install the latest libgit2 (as annoying as this process sounds):

# sudo apt-get install cmake gcc or sudo yum install cmake make gcc
git clone -b master git://github.com/libgit2/libgit2.git
mkdir libgit2/build
cd libgit2/build
cmake ..
cmake --build .
sudo cmake --build . --target install

And then, for systems with apt-get

sudo apt-get install libpython-dev libgmp-dev

Or for systems with yum

yum install python-devel gmp-devel

And then use pip!:

pip install credo_manager

Or if you’re developing it:

pip install -e .
pip install -e ".[tests]"

Usage

Import some keys:

credo import

Export those keys to your environment:

`credo exports`
# Display prints out the required environment exports
# The backticks means your shell will run those exports

Or execute a command with those keys:

credo exec bash -c 'echo $AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID'

All credo commands take:

credo <credo_options> <|action|> <action_options>

Where <credo_options> help filter out the different keys you have stored.

Upon ambiguity credo will ask you questions and tries it’s best to provide cli options to remove that ambiguity when you use the command.

For example, when importing keys, credo will look for environment variables, boto configuration, aws configuration or allow you to specify your own keys. It will only prompt you for the sources it finds, or you can say what source you want:

credo import --source environment

The <credo_options> filter can be:

-u/–user <user>

Where user is either the name of the user or user@account or user@account@repo. Account and repo specified here will override the other filters

-a/–account <account>

Where account is either the name of the account or account@repo. Repo specified here will override anything in the –repo filter.

-r/–repo <repo>

Where repo is the name of the repository.

Advanced Usage

If you put something like this in your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc:

credo() {
    if command credo sourceable $@; then
        output=$(command credo $@)
        if (($? == 0)); then
            source <(echo $output)
        else
            echo "$output"
        fi
    else
        command credo $@
    fi
}

Then when you run credo inject it will source the exports into your environment and you don’t need to do anything other than just use credo at the command line.

Status

Currently Credo seems to work fine.

Though, I haven’t written tests for the majority of it, so I’ll make no guarantees at the moment.

No tests means my implementation is a bit messier than I would like and it’s likely there are hidden bugs in some of the code that handles the corner cases I don’t see in my normal usage.

So until tests are written, this should be considered alpha quality.

Also, credulous has more people working on it and one of the reasons they chose golang was the ability to distribute a single, static binary.

Credo, however, does have some things credulous doesn’t and a different approach to storing and retrieving information.

Features

Credo usage allows you to specify what you want to do via the cli and credo will ask questions for any ambiguity it comes across.

credo exports

Print out export lines for exporting the credentials

credo inject

An alias for credo exports

Credo inject will be registered as sourceable by the credo sourceable command

credo exec

Run a command with credentials in the environment of that command

credo import

Add credentials

credo rotate

Rotate credentials

credo show

Show what credentials credo is currently aware of

credo current

Display the username, account alias and account id of the amazon credentials you currently have in your environment.

credo synchronize

Make a repository synced with it’s remote

credo capture

Capture environment variables

credo env

Display only environment variables that have been captured

credo unset

Reset any environment variables credo has changed to what they were before credo set them

credo remote

Allows you to edit the remote for some repository. All commands will add changes as they are made and will try to synchronise with any remote that is set.

Note that this functionality is extremely rudimentary

Versioning without a remote

Makes it a git repository without adding any remote

No versioning at all

Removes any .git folder in that repository

Versioning with some remote

If not already versioned, makes it a git folder, and makes sure we have the remote set as specified.

credo sourceable <argv>

Exits with 0 (yes) or 1 (no) to say whether the output of running credo with the specified arguments should be sourced into the running shell.

See the Advanced Usage section to see this in use.

Note that if you give “–no-sourcing” as an action option, then sourceable will say this command should not be sourced

It also does:

• Stores your credentials so that you have repositories of users in particular accounts.

• Import from environment, ~/.boto, ~/.aws/config or values you specify

• Knows about profiles in ~/.boto and ~/.aws/config

• Uses signatures to ensure that only you ever write encrypted credentials

• Uses signatures to ensure that the credentials you load is for the account that you think it is for

• Copes when keys are no longer usable.

• Lets you specify urls or just pem_data for the public keys per repository and caches what it finds

• Minimises the number of times you need to enter a password for your private keys

• Tries it’s best to find situations it can’t handle and display nice error messages to the screen

• Tries to be informative about what is happening

• Rotate keys automatically

• Can capture environment variables per repository, account and user

Rotation

Credo will do key rotation similar to credulous.

It does this by recording a “half_life” for each key, which is the number of seconds since the creation of the key before it “rotates”.

Rotation means the other key (amazon only allows you to have two keys) gets deleted and a new key is created.

Also, if a key is older than twice it’s half life, it’s deleted.

When credo chooses a key to use, it will always use the youngest key.

Credo also handles the following situations:

• Both keys are no longer working

• There is a key in amazon credo doesn’t know about * Credo asks if you want to delete it or tell it the secret key

• Both keys credo knows about are past their half life

• Both keys credo knows about are both past twice their half life

• The keys credo knows about don’t need to be deleted or rotated

Layout

Credo will layout your credentials using the following folder structure:

~/.credo/
    config.json

    repos/
        <repository>/
            keys
            env.json
            <account>/
                account_id
                env.json
                <user>/
                    username
                    env.json
                    credentials.json

Where config.json has some configuration for credo, account_id holds the id of the amazon account represented by that folder, and credentials.json has amazon credential for that user and account.

The keys file holds the pems you want credo to encrypt details with. It is signed by one of your private keys to ensure only your public keys are in this file.

The account_id is a file with one line containing “<account_id>,<fingerprint>,<signature>” where the fingerprint and signature is used to verify that one of your private keys recorded this account_id under this account and repository. This is to ensure that the credentials found in credentials.json do actually belong to this account and repo.

The username is a file like the account_id but holds the amazon username associated with this user, and a signature used to validate this name.

The credentials.json contains the credentials encrypted with each public key it knows about and a signature used to verify that the credentials were written using one of you private keys against a particular account and user.

This means you may only add credentials using one of your private keys.

The format of credentials.json includes the half_life of the key, the epoch signifying when that credential was created and for each key we use to decrypt the data, a secret that is encrypted with your ssh key, a signature saying your private key created that secret, and the credentials themselves encrypted with AES using that secret.

Each env.json file has a similar format to credentials.json but it has type of environment and includes environment variables that have been captured by the credo capture command.

Tests

Run the helpful script:

./test.sh