Certificate management utilities with Vault backend
Project description
What is Knox v0.1.0
The name is derived from “Fort Knox” the safest place to store valuables in history. At least that is the myth. This tool or set of utilities is explicitly for managing TLS certificates including metadata about them and storing it in a backend.
Primary components used are Python, Hashicorp Vault, Let’s Encrypt and certbot.
[Let’s Encrypt](<https://letsencrypt.org>) is a certificate authority managed by the [Internet Security Research Group (ISRG)](<https://www.abetterinternet.org/about/>). It utilizes the [Automated Certificate Management Environment (ACME)](<https://github.com/ietf-wg-acme/acme/>) to automatically deploy free SSL certificates that are trusted by nearly all major browsers. [The certificate compatibility list can be found here](<https://letsencrypt.org/docs/certificate-compatibility/>). Lets Encrypt has revolutionized the distribution of certificates for public facing servers.
[Hashicorp Vault](<https://www.vaultproject.io/>) is a tool for storing secrets. It has a [PKI Secret Engine](<https://www.vaultproject.io/docs/secrets/pki/index.html>) backend which allows to use it as a certificate authority in an internal public key infrastructure deployment. Until now, Vault is best suited for issuing private certificates.
Let’s Encrypt and Hashicorp Vault are complementary in certificate management.
Dataflow Diagram
![](deployment-3D.png)
There may not necessarily be a container between Certbot or the Devops agent but the key is all access to manage the certs goes through a knox command. Once in place the cert can be accessed directly from Vault by deployment mechanisms with or without knox. Essentially its just a key value path to json. Knox just unifies how and what is stored and provides convenience methods for managing the certs.
Installation
To get started:
pip install knox
You can also install the in-development version with:
pip install git+ssh://git@github.com/8x8cloud/knox.git@develop
Or run it as a container:
docker run 8x8cloud/knox
See [Dynaconf](https://dynaconf.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) for how the configuration is read in. At its simplest just add environment variables into a .env file.
Metadata
Knox will store the certificate body, in its entirety, along with metadata related to the details of the certificate. The data will be organized and retreived using a tree struction mimicking the DNS naming heirarchy.
Tree Structure:
certificates: ├── com │ └── example │ └── cloud │ ├── acceptance │ ├── production │ └── staging ├── internal │ └── example └── net └── example
As a result the host name www.example.com storage path will be /com/example/www
Additional data will be stored with the body of the certificates. A jinja template will be provided. Although the cert body and cert data will have alternate RBAC rules for accessing. Below is a sample:
{ "cert_info": { "subject": { "commonName": "www.example.com", "countryName": "US", "emailAddress": "cert@example.com", "localityName": "San Jose", "organizationName": "Example, Inc.", "organizationalUnitName": "Engineering", "stateOrProvinceName": "CA" }, "issuer": { "commonName": "www.example.com", "countryName": "US", "emailAddress": "cert@example.com", "localityName": "San Jose", "organizationName": "Example, Inc.", "organizationalUnitName": "Engineering", "stateOrProvinceName": "CA" }, "key_details": { "fingerprint_sha256": "f6874a226e4d2ea54eed11d8d71e27f5fbd965630aa84f71414209b0227c448c", "key": { "size": 4096, "type": "RSA" }, "serial_number": "11672594923309745709", "version": "v1" }, "validity": { "not_valid_after": "2021-05-17 18:49:00", "not_valid_before": "2020-05-17 18:49:00" } }, "cert_body": { "private": "REDACTED", "chain": "REDACTED", "public": "REDACTED" } }
Documentation
Development
This project was initialized using a very cool python project templating tool called [cookiecutter-pylibrary](https://github.com/ionelmc/cookiecutter-pylibrary) from [Ionel Cristian Mărieș](https://github.com/ionelmc). Definitely check it out to see all the tools available and good usage docs.
To execute everything run:
tox
To see all the tox environments:
tox -l
To only build the docs:
tox -e docs
To build and verify that the built package is proper and other code QA checks:
tox -e check
To update [Travis CI](https://travis-ci.org) configuration:
tox -e bootstrap
You will need a [Vault](https://hub.docker.com/_/vault) server running locally:
>docker run \ --cap-add=IPC_LOCK \ -p 8201:8201 \ -p 8200:8200 \ -e 'VAULT_DEV_ROOT_TOKEN_ID=knox' \ -d --name=dev-vault \ vault >docker ps CONTAINER ID IMAGE COMMAND CREATED STATUS PORTS NAMES d89fbfd340c3 vault "docker-entrypoint.s…" 5 hours ago Up 5 hours 0.0.0.0:8200-8201->8200-8201/tcp dev-vault
Set the token ID and container name to your preferences. Verify you can talk to vault using the vault cli:
>export VAULT_ADDR=http://0.0.0.0:8200 >export VAULT_TOKEN=knox >vault status Key Value --- ----- Seal Type shamir Initialized true Sealed false Total Shares 1 Threshold 1 Version 1.4.1 Cluster Name vault-cluster-31da8ea9 Cluster ID 043bfc14-09b1-6033-1c3b-8aeace3adc60 HA Enabled false
Update your knox configuration using .env or direct environment variables:
ENVVAR_PREFIX_FOR_DYNACONF=KNOX INCLUDES_FOR_DYNACONF='./config/*' KNOX_TEMP=/tmp KNOX_LOG_LEVEL=DEBUG KNOX_STORE_ENGINE=vault KNOX_VAULT_URL=http://127.0.0.1:8200 KNOX_VAULT_TOKEN="knox" KNOX_VAULT_MOUNT="certificates" KNOX_VAULT_CLIENT_MAX_VERSIONS=10 KNOX_VAULT_CLIENT_CAS=False KNOX_FILE_HOME=./test
And Or use a settings file:
{ "default": { "ENVVAR_PREFIX_FOR_DYNACONF": "KNOX", "INCLUDES_FOR_DYNACONF": "./config/*", "KNOX_TEMP": "./tmp", "KNOX_LOG_LEVEL": "DEBUG", "KNOX_STORE_ENGINE": "vault", "KNOX_VAULT_URL": "http://127.0.0.1:8200", "KNOX_VAULT_TOKEN": "knox", "KNOX_VAULT_MOUNT": "certificates", "KNOX_VAULT_CLIENT_MAX_VERSIONS": "10", "KNOX_VAULT_CLIENT_CAS": "True", "KNOX_FILE_HOME": "./test" }, "development": { "ENVVAR_PREFIX_FOR_DYNACONF": "KNOX", "INCLUDES_FOR_DYNACONF": "./config/*" }, "production": { "ENVVAR_PREFIX_FOR_DYNACONF": "KNOX", "INCLUDES_FOR_DYNACONF": "./config/*" } }
Don’t want to install python, I got you:
docker run --net=host 8x8cloud/knox --help Usage: knox [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]... Utilities for managing and storing TLS certificates using backing store (Vault). Options: -l, --log [TRACE|DEBUG|INFO|SUCCESS|WARNING|ERROR|CRITICAL] Sets the level of logging displayed [default: INFO] -v, --verbose Display log output to console --version Show the version and exit. --help Show this message and exit. Commands: cert Certificate utilities. store Store commands.
Mount a local volume to access certs:
docker run --net=host \ -v ~/dev/knox/examples/:/examples \ 8x8cloud/knox cert \ --pub /examples/sample_cert1.pem \ --key /examples/sample_key1.pem \ save www.example.com
Search for stored certificates:
knox store find * # list all the certificates info knox store find *.example.com # list all the *.example.com certificates knox store find com/example/www # list about www.example.com
Changelog
0.0.0 (2020-05-08)
First release on PyPI.
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