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Secrets configuration

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Nadine Quin edited this page May 18, 2022 · 4 revisions

SmartConfig

SmartConfig is an extension of Typesafe Config that allows any configuration elements to be treated as a "secret". To configure an element as "secret", convert the value to a Config section under the configSecret key. The metadata needed to resolve or fetch the secret value is listed under this key. Because this Config Section is unstructured, we can support multiple ways of resolving the secret by providing an implementation of SecretsLookupService. An advantage of this approach is that any configuration value can be encrypted and the consumer of the configuration does not need to be aware. Operators can define their own policy about what is sensitive and what is not. For example, one could consider only passwords, such as DB passwords, sensitive or one could treat usernames as sensitive also. Corda does not have a preferred policy.

EncryptionSecretsService

The default implementation of SecretsLookupService is provided by the EncryptionSecretsService implementation. This implementation uses symmetric encryption with a key that is derived from a salt and passphrase that are passed to the worker processes as start-up parameters during the bootstrap process. All processes that share a configuration must be configured with the same salt and passphrase. This offers some level of protection by ensuring that the secrets with configuration at rest are not readable unless the passphrase and salt are know. However, given that the passphrase and salt are passed into the worker processes as start-up parameters, it is possible that they will leak into deployment scripts, for example, and be present along with other configuration that is passed to the process at start-up (e.g. DB connection details for the DB worker).

Implementations that provide integration with 3rd party secrets managers such HashiCorp Vault or AWS Secrets Manager may be available in later releases and provide a more secure way of managing secrets.

MaskedSecretsLookupService

The MaskedSecretsLookupService implemenation of SecretsLookupService has two roles. It acts as a fall-back when the SmartConfigFactory factory (create) method cannot configure a "real" SecretsLookupService implementation. It can also be used as a way to ensure secrets are never revealed but always return ****. This can be useful when printing a configuration, for example. You can create a copy of SmartConfig that always uses the MaskedSecretsLookupService by using the toSafeConfig() function. This implementation is also the default when SmartConfig is rendered (using the root().render() function).

Use cases

An obvious use case for secrets is the DB credentials for the cluster DB which must be passed into the DB workers at start-up.

Others are:

  • DB credentials for other DBs (e.g. VNode Vault) stored in the DB cluster.
  • Private keys managed by the Crypto Worker.

Usage

Boot

Workers are configured to use the EncryptionSecretsService by passing in the following parameters:

<processor> -s salt=<salt> -s passphrase=<passphrase>

The start-up parameters are purposely "unstructured", as other implementations of SecretsLookupService may require different configuration.

Given the above parameters, the process will create a SmartConfigFactory like this:

val secretsConfig = ConfigManager.parseMap(<map-from-values-passed-into-the-s-startup-parameter>)
val configFactory = SmartConfigFactory.create(secretsConfig)

A regular typesafe Config object can then be turned into a SmartConfig object like so:

val config = configFactory.create(<type-safe-config-object>)

See applications/workers/release/deploy/docker-compose.yaml for an example of an encrypted DB credential passed into the DB worker.

Using a secret

Once SmartConfig has been configured correctly, fetching a secret is the same as fetching a regular Config value. For example, config.getString('foo') returns the value for foo in plain text. You can also check whether a configuration value is a secret by using config.isSecret('foo'). See SmartConfigTest.kt for more examples.

Configuring a secret

To configure a secret, adding a config section with the configSecret key and sett the required metadata. For the EncryptionSecretsService implementation, this is simply the encrypted value.

For example:

{
  "foo": "bar",
  "fred": "also"
}

fred can be turned into a secret as follows:

{
  "foo": "bar",
  "fred": {
    "configSecret": {
      "encryptedSecret": "<encrypted-value>"
    } 
  }
}

Note: This configuration can be a boot configuration or a configuration that is created using the Config HTTP API, which will in turn be published to Kafka. As a result, it is important that sensitive configuration is not persisted and published as plain text.

A corda-cli command will be available to easily create a secret configuration sections given a salt and passphrase.

Creating secrets at runtime

In some cases, secrets need to be created and persisted by the workers. For example, the DB worker manages DB credentials for other DBs such as the VNode Vault DBs. In this case, the DB worker can use the EncryptionSecretsService implementation to create a Config Section from plain text using the createValue(plainText: String) function. Similarly, the Crypto Worker can use this to wrap keys and manage HSM configuration.

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