knox 0.1.0

Certificate management utilities with Vault backend

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


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://[e-mail]/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": "[e-mail]",
             "localityName": "San Jose",
             "organizationName": "Example, Inc.",
             "organizationalUnitName": "Engineering",
             "stateOrProvinceName": "CA"
        },
        "issuer": {
             "commonName": "www.example.com",
             "countryName": "US",
             "emailAddress": "[e-mail]",
             "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

https://knox.readthedocs.io/

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.