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vault-rbac-controller

A controller for managing application access to Vault secrets via the Kubernetes RBAC system.

Policies and connection roles are automatically created in Vault according to annotations on ServiceAccounts, RoleBindings, and/or Roles. Examples can be found in the deploy/samples directory.

Quickstart

If you don't have access to a Kubernetes cluster, you can create one easily locally with kind, k3d, or your preferred tool.

# Using kind
kind create cluster

# Using k3d
k3d cluster create

Installing and Configuring Vault

The controller is intended to be used with the Kubernetes auth method and the Agent Sidecar Injector that is included in the Vault helm chart by default. These components must be deployed to the cluster before beginning.

For the sake of the quickstart, we'll deploy a standalone Vault server without TLS and a single key. We'll also disable the readiness/liveness probes so we can unseal the Vault. These are not the recommended practices for a production installation.

helm repo add hashicorp https://helm.releases.hashicorp.com
helm repo update
helm install \
    --create-namespace \
    --namespace vault \
    --set server.standalone.enabled=true \
    --set server.readinessProbe.enabled=false \
    --set server.livenessProbe.enabled=false \
    vault hashicorp/vault

# Wait for the vault pod to start
kubectl wait pod --namespace vault --for=condition=Ready --timeout=300s vault-0

Next we need to initialize the vault, enable a secret engine, and enable the Kubernetes auth method.

# Initialize and unseal
kubectl exec -it --namespace vault vault-0 -- vault operator init -key-shares=1 -key-threshold=1 -format=json > keys.json
kubectl exec -it --namespace vault vault-0 -- vault operator unseal "$(jq -r ".unseal_keys_b64[]" keys.json)"
# Login on the pod
kubectl exec -it --namespace vault vault-0 -- vault login $(jq -r ".root_token" keys.json)
# Enable a secret engine
kubectl exec -it --namespace vault vault-0 -- vault secrets enable -path=secret kv-v2
# Enable the kubernetes auth method
kubectl exec -it --namespace vault vault-0 -- vault auth enable kubernetes
# Configure the auth method to use the internal API server
kubectl exec -it --namespace vault vault-0 -- \
    /bin/sh -c \
    'vault write auth/kubernetes/config \
        kubernetes_host="https://${KUBERNETES_SERVICE_HOST}:${KUBERNETES_SERVICE_PORT}"'

The deployment manifets for the controller assume the agent injector using Kubernetes auth. An example minimum policy is included in the repository for the controller. To create a Kubernetes auth role for the policy, execute the following commands:

# Write the policy included in this repository to the server
cat deploy/vault_policy.hcl | kubectl exec -it --namespace vault vault-0 -- vault policy write vault-rbac-controller -
# Bind the controller's (soon to be) service account to the policy
kubectl exec -it --namespace vault vault-0 -- vault write auth/kubernetes/role/vault-rbac-controller \
		bound_service_account_names=vault-rbac-controller \
		bound_service_account_namespaces=vault \
		policies=vault-rbac-controller

Installing the Controller

You can either use the helm chart or the kustomizization to deploy the controller. Both can be found in the deploy/ directory. The chart is not published anywhere yet, so you'll have to clone the repository first to use it. The defaults in the kustomization assume the names and insecure settings used in this quickstart. Otherwise, edit the config_patch.yaml to suit your needs or create a wrapping kustomization. To install using kustomize:

kubectl kustomize https://github.com/tinyzimmer/vault-rbac-controller/deploy/kustomize \
    | kubectl apply -f -

You can now experiment with the controller.

The manifests in deploy/samples contain various ways to use the controller. They all depend on a secret/example. You can generate one with:

kubectl exec -it --namespace vault vault-0 -- vault kv put secret/example api_key=$(uuidgen)

Usage

Vault ACLs for a ServiceAccount can be configured in one of three ways:

  • Inline policy in an annotation on the ServiceAccount
  • Inline policy in a ConfigMap referenced by an annotation on the ServiceAccount
  • Roles containing rules with the apiGroup "vault.hashicorp.com" and their associated RoleBindings.

Complete examples can be found in the deploy/samples directory. For a full list of the annotations used with their descriptions, see the annotations.go file.

Below are the command-line options for the controller:

-auth-mount string
    The auth mount for the kubernetes auth method. (default "kubernetes")
-exclude-namespaces string
    The namespaces to exclude from watching. If empty, no namespaces are excluded.
-health-probe-bind-address string
    The address the probe endpoint binds to. (default ":8081")
-include-system-namespaces
    Include system namespaces in the watched namespaces.
-kubeconfig string
    Paths to a kubeconfig. Only required if out-of-cluster.
-leader-elect
    Enable leader election for controller manager. Enabling this will ensure there is only one active controller manager.
-metrics-bind-address string
    The address the metric endpoint binds to. (default ":8080")
-namespaces string
    The namespaces to watch for roles. If empty, all namespaces are watched.
-use-finalizers
    Ensure finalizers on resources to attempt to clean up on deletion.
-zap-devel
    Development Mode defaults(encoder=consoleEncoder,logLevel=Debug,stackTraceLevel=Warn). Production Mode defaults(encoder=jsonEncoder,logLevel=Info,stackTraceLevel=Error) (default true)
-zap-encoder value
    Zap log encoding (one of 'json' or 'console')
-zap-log-level value
    Zap Level to configure the verbosity of logging. Can be one of 'debug', 'info', 'error', or any integer value > 0 which corresponds to custom debug levels of increasing verbosity
-zap-stacktrace-level value
    Zap Level at and above which stacktraces are captured (one of 'info', 'error', 'panic').
-zap-time-encoding value
    Zap time encoding (one of 'epoch', 'millis', 'nano', 'iso8601', 'rfc3339' or 'rfc3339nano'). Defaults to 'epoch'.

Development

For local development you will need go and docker (or your preferred image building tool). The defaults in the Makefile assume a Linux target and your local architecture, but these can be overriden with the OS and ARCH variables.

To build the image:

make
# OR
make build

To run the tests:

make test

The tests use the controller-runtime envtest package. The Makefile will attempt to install the required dependencies for you.

The Makefile also contains helpers for spinning up and deploying to local clusters. They resemble the quickstart in this README. You can run make help to get more information on the available options.

Contributing

Issues and PRs are welcome. Templates and more information will come later.