equinix / smartkey-kubernetes-webhook

An alpha webhook that mutates Kubernetes secrets to encrypt its content using an encryption key from SmartKey. When a pod wants to use a secret, the mutate webhook injects an init container that decrypts the secrets with SmartKey and stores them in a shared volume in memory with the pod.

SmartKey Mutate Webhook for Kubernetes Secrets

This is an alpha webhook that mutates Kubernetes secrets to encrypt its content using an encryption key from SmartKey. When a pod wants to use a secret, the mutate webhook injects an init container that decrypts the secrets with SmartKey and stores them in a shared volume in memory with the pod. All data secrets are available under the /smk/secrets/ folder.

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Requirements

• An SmartKey account
• Kubernetes v1.16 or higher
• Ensure that the MutatingAdmissionWebhook controller is enabled
• Ensure that the admissionregistration.k8s.io/v1 API is enabled

If you can run the following command without getting any error, you're good to go:

kubectl get mutatingwebhookconfigurations

How to Install the Webhook

Before you start, you need to get the SmartKey setting values for the credentials secret below:

• Use the endpoint URL from your SmartKey account for the SMARTKEY_URL setting.
• Generate a (or use an existing) API key from your account for the SMARTKEY_API_KEY setting.
• Generate a (or use an existing) security object, and take note of the object UUID for the SMARTKEY_OBJECT_UUID setting.

Clone this repository locally, and run the following commands using the setting values from above:

cd smartkey-kubernetes-webhook
kubectl create namespace smartkey-vault
kubectl create secret generic smk-credentials \
 --from-literal=SMARTKEY_URL='https://eu.smartkey.io' \
 --from-literal=SMARTKEY_OBJECT_UUID='{YOUR_SECURITY_OBJECT_UUID}' \
 --from-literal=SMARTKEY_API_KEY='{YOUR_API_KEY}' \
 -n smartkey-vaul --dry-run=client -o yaml | kubectl apply -f -
./deploy.sh

Confirm that the webhook is running:

kubectl get mutatingwebhookconfigurations
kubectl describe mutatingwebhookconfiguration smartkey-webhook
kubectl get all -n smartkey-vault

How to Encrypt Secrets

Label a Namespace

The mutate webhook only works if your namespace has the proper label.

To label a namespace, run the following command:

kubectl label namespace default smartkey-vault=enabled

Generate a Secret

Creating a secret doesn't change, you simply run a command in the cluster like the following one:

kubectl create secret generic db-user-pass \
 --from-file=./username.txt --from-file=./password.txt \
 --dry-run=client -o yaml | kubectl apply -f -

If you try to get the values from the secret, they're still encoded in base64 but its content is encrypted.

kubectl get secret db-user-pass -o json
echo ENCODEDVALUE | base64 --decode

Include SmartKey Annotations

Once you create the secret, the only way to decrypt it is by including the annotations in the pod referencing the scret name, like this:

  annotations:
    smartkey.io/agent-secret-credentials: "db-user-pass"

Based on the above anotation, the name of the secret is db-user-pass and the name of the folder available in the container will be credentials.

What does that mean? When you create a POD like the following one:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: nginx
  labels:
    app: nginx
  annotations:
    smartkey.io/agent-secret-credentials: "db-user-pass"
spec:
  containers:
  - name: nginx
    image: nginx:1.14.2
    ports:
    - containerPort: 80

You can inspect the init container logs in case something fails or you want to confirm that everything worked.

kubectl logs nginx -c smk-decrypt-init

You can get access to the secrets at /smk/secrets/credentials/, you can give it a try by running the following commands:

kubectl exec nginx -c nginx -- ls -la /smk/secrets
kubectl exec nginx -c nginx -- ls -la /smk/secrets/credentials
kubectl exec nginx -c nginx -- cat /smk/secrets/credentials/password.txt
kubectl exec nginx -c nginx -- cat /smk/secrets/credentials/username.txt

How to Uninstall the Webhook

Simply run the following command:

kubectl delete -f deployment/

Roadmap

• Cover more use cases for secrets configuration besides the data type
• Provide the option to use secrets in environment variables (although it's not recommended)
• Support for automatically decrypt a secret when the data changes