RFC: Redesign Certificate Handling within Foreman Deployments

Development RFCs
21

I presume you mean if there is no networking involved (i.e. no ability to reach out to some service and request a signed certificate). This would be done the way Katello does this today. All certificates are generated on the server and must be copied over to their respective locations for use. Which really only happens when spinning up an external smart proxy. I often think its fair to ask how much this happens within an organization? How much are we trying to optimize for a rarer operation?

This conversation does interweave two certificate concepts I believe so I do want to separate them:

  • infra certificates
  • client host certificates

For infra as of today:

  • Foreman base installs use Puppet CA
  • Katello base installs create and use a self-signed certificate

For host certificates connecting back to Foreman:

  • Foreman base installs tend to use Puppet CA
  • Katello uses Candlepin generated certificates from the self-signed CA

This raises two questions I am less familiar with:

  1. What does a Salt or Chef or Ansible only installation prefer for client certificates? (relates to the optional Puppet RFC)
  2. I assume if you had a base Foreman installation, with hosts able to connect back without a config management provider in a more inventory focused deployment. Those hosts would need a client certificate generated from somewhere that Foreman is able to authenticate them with?
22

Sorry for asking again, but I believe the external smart proxy should generate a key and a CSR. The CSR is not a secret, so a user does not need to make sure it stays private. The CA can then issue a certificate (also public data) that the user transfers to the external proxy.
If we implemented the CA as part of Foreman, the user would install the external proxy, copy the CSR into the browser, Foreman would issue a certificate that the user can download and transfer it to the smart-proxy. We could even embed some data into the CSR so that Foreman automatically creates a SmartProxy object or something. Sounds like a secure and user-friendly use case. Is this feasible?

I can’t answer this, but if the goal is to provide an agnostic tool, I guess we have to solve this ourselves. Ansible uses SSH for transport and not HTTP, so I believe it does not have this challenge. SSH can use certificates, though.

Yep. I believe that’s what the Katello use-case currently does with the candlepin issued certificates you mentioned. An activation key basically approves a host to get a certificate. Is this secure enough?

23

We still need something that handles formatting for other services like Candlepin where keystores are required but I think what you noted as the base workflow and support is feasible. In the end, I forsee us spending more time discussing and hammering out the design than implementaion.

Indeed. I’m thinking more along the lines of how hosts tell Foreman they should be added to the inventory. Today that’s through a variety of tools right?

  • puppet agent
  • subscription-manager
  • Ansible callback

Do we aim to simply support those with “common” APIs, one for each, or do we also support a generic method for a host to “register” itself for lack of a better term?

The subscription-manager register process is what handles this. Activation keys provide a way to bring a host into the inventory without needing to know any credentials but they are not secure. If you know the name of the key you can add it the inventory.

24

I’ve played with this idea in a small plugin called foreman_register (naming is hard, right? :wink: ). The workflow idea is that a user is presented with a curl http://foreman.example.com/bla/bla/bla | bash type command that is supposed to be run in order to register or enroll a host with Foreman. Part of the URL is a JWT that acts as a secret and basically makes the process secure. The JWT includes the hostname so Foreman can present a host-specific enrollment script. The script is a Foreman template.
This is might be a pattern that is worth investigating so the CA could issue a certificate. If we send some fact data along the way, maybe with the new ufacter tool, we could also create a host even if it’s unknown to Foreman.

I believe this is mostly based on fact processing. The smart-proxy is trusted and if a smart-proxy sends facts (e.g. via Puppet or Ansible) the host object is created.

Yes, this could be client software (a simple cli app) I mentioned earlier. But this app does not need to be the CA. If we make Foreman the CA, this tool could also bootstrap the CA and issue (the first) certs for the Foreman webserver. As real (human) users access Foreman, I can see that users might want to switch out the webserver certificate with a certificate that is trusted by a browser (usually some kind of internal CA). Also something to keep in mind. Does this contradict that Foreman could be the CA (for the rest of the services and the client certs use-case).

Let’s try to avoid this. I believe we have roughly touched all the important areas now. How are we going to proceed? From my point of view, the brainstorming phase is finished and we need to create a rough design.

25

If we get to design, I think we need an interface for a CA. Ideally it can front multiple CA’s. Reusing and integrating existing tools has always been what Foreman has been about.

You may now think about certmonger. It’s available in EL, Debian and Ubuntu. It can talk to FreeIPA but also has a local CA backend. I just learned about SCEP and it looks like Active Directory also implements that. It’s also possible to write custom backends. It can write both PEM and NSS. However, a major downside is that it uses dbus and that is usually not running in containers.

As for the CA itself, we can look at dogtag which is the CA behind FreeIPA. It is a tomcat service, so it might be quite heavy. The benefit is that we wouldn’t invent our own tools and users with an existing FreeIPA deployment could just use it without issue. I suspect it’s audited as well.

Because they’re networked and daemons, they can handle renewals automatically which removes that burden from sysadmins.

Regarding PuppetCA I think there are 2 possible ways. One is to write a certmonger backend for PuppetCA and the other is to issue an intermediate CA certificate for PuppetCA so there’s still a single CA hierarchy. https://puppet.com/docs/puppetserver/latest/intermediate_ca.html documents such a setup where you import an external CA.

An alternative is Vault’s PKI.

Lastly Candlepin is also a CA.

In short: I’d like to avoid writing Yet Another CA

1 Like
26

We have had very good experience with this. There is even a plug-in we developed. The development of more features will start next week.

SCEP is quite limited and has known security flaws as far as I know. We should avoid it by all means. If you need a ruby client implementation, let me know. We have one. It’s not pretty.

Fair point! I wouldn’t rule it out, though.

27

I like the idea of using some other tool, it just needs to be something else than puppet agent. I don’t want to be forced to install Puppet to be able register a host. So it needs to be super-simple tool only dedicated to X.509 management.

On the other hand, it should not limit us or force us to implement some complex APIs. What we actually need to do is couple of openssl commands essentially. So I only agree to the point that a tool that perfectly fits our purpose exists. If not, let’s create new one.

Also the actual process should be dead simple and applicable in most operating systems or workflows. I believe a single CLI utility with minimum dependencies and a one or two HTTP calls is something that most of us expects.

28

IMHO individual host registration is out of scope and limit ourselves only to Foreman and all tools that talk to Foreman. I don’t want to get in the business of host registration because Puppet and Subscription Manager do that just fine. AFAIK you can also use Ansible with callbacks and use SSH as a transport.

29

I don’t believe this is out of scope because to register a host in Foreman today, the worfklow is actually:

  1. Install puppet
  2. Get a cert
  3. Check in
1 Like
30

Can it be out if scope? If we can issue a certificate for a smart-proxy, we have basically solved “individual host registration” as well, haven’t we?

31

It is Puppet that creates the host, not the host itself. The authentication is bound to the Smart Proxy Puppet feature. Replacing Puppet for host creation is IMHO out of scope since you need additional authentication that the host really is allowed to upload.

Currently creating a Smart Proxy happens using OAuth credentials. Replacing this makes the scope much bigger. In theory you could embed information in the certificate that it’s allowed to be a Smart Proxy but then you need to revoke certificates and deal with a CRL which Foreman currently doesn’t.

32

If Foreman (or the tool we invent here) acts as a CA, we have to deal with this anyway.
I agree, that we have to thing we need to solve here. One is to verify the certificates and put them in the right place. I believe it’s a no brainer that this could very easily be done using the puppet modules (and the installer).
The harder challenge is: What tool signs these certificates and how does this tool verify that it is allowed to sign a certificate? Any suggestions?

33

I am posting an update here with a proof of concept based off the CLI proposal. This is intended to test the simple design, identify any modifications and use it as a basis for how to proceed.

Proof of Concept

I built a clamp-based Ruby CLI named foreman_pki to generate a certificate authority and a set of certificates based on the needs of the installation.

The set of certificates desired are pre-defined bundles that define the standard set of needed certificates for an installation. In the proof of concept, this includes the bundle for Foreman, Katello and a Smart Proxy. Bundles can be enabled via a configuration file.

The implementation places all certificates under a common structure as seen below. The common structure was designed to make it easy to locate all certificates for an installation, easy to understand with a common naming structure and allow installer/puppet modules to control permissions on the certificates per the needs of a given service. There is an additional naming scheme introduced for client certificates to better understand what a certificate is used for. For example, when Katello is present and needs to communicate with Pulp a foreman-pulp certificate is generated. This is different than Foreman needing to talk to smart-proxies which get a foreman-to-smart-proxy certificate name.

root@foreman foreman_pki (master)$ tree /etc/foreman_pki/certs/
/etc/foreman_pki/certs/
├── apache
│   ├── apache.crt
│   └── apache.key
├── artemis
│   ├── password
│   └── truststore
├── ca
│   ├── ca.crt
│   └── ca.key
├── candlepin
│   ├── ca.crt
│   └── ca.key
├── foreman
│   ├── foreman-to-candlepin.crt
│   ├── foreman-to-candlepin.key
│   ├── foreman-to-pulp.crt
│   ├── foreman-to-pulp.key
│   ├── foreman-to-smart-proxy.crt
│   └── foreman-to-smart-proxy.key
├── smart-proxy
│   ├── smart-proxy.crt
│   └── smart-proxy.key
└── tomcat
    ├── keystore
    ├── password
    ├── tomcat.crt
    └── tomcat.key

Usage

Usage:
    foreman-pki [OPTIONS] SUBCOMMAND [ARG] ...

Parameters:
    SUBCOMMAND    subcommand
    [ARG] ...     subcommand arguments

Subcommands:
    generate      Generate certificates
    view          View a certificate
    list          List all certificates
    verify        Verify all certificates
    import-ca     Import a CA
    export        Export certificate bundle as a tarball
    import        Import certificate bundle

Options:
    -h, --help    print help

From the installer’s perspective, the foreman-pki generate command can be ran by the installer to create all of the certificates after laying down a config.yaml file. Let’s look at a few examples running this outside the context of the installer:

Foreman Install:

$ cat <<EOT >> /etc/foreman_pki/conifg.yaml
Bundles:
foreman
EOT
$ foreman-pki generate
$ foreman-installer --scenario foreman

Now if one were to add Katello:

$ cat <<EOT >> /etc/foreman_pki/conifg.yaml
Bundles:
Foreman
katello
EOT

$ foreman-pki generate
$ foreman-installer --scenario katello

Notes

The current proof of concept can import a certificate if pointed to a CA certificate and private key pair on disk. There is currently no integration with an HTTP based CA such a Puppet CA or Vault. The goal was to nail the simple use cases while considering how Katello installations handle certificates today. The current implementation can importa Puppet CA but using the import-ca command pointed at the Puppet CA cert and key on disk.

Thoughts and discussion are encouraged so that I can figure out next steps.

4 Likes
34

Nice tool. Maybe adding a “certificate provider” abstraction layer should be nice. Your implementation may be the “embeded” provider and this abstraction will ease implementation of other certificate providers in the future (certmonger, vault…)

Regarding path name, maybe /etc/foreman-pki will be more consistent as we alreaday have /etc/foreman-proxy, /etc/foreman-installer

1 Like
35

The typo looks consistent. Is this a copy paste error?

Also, the casing on bundles appears inconsistent.

Do you have an example where the hostname is set? IMHO we should not rely on getting the hostname from the system

I still think it would make sense to be able to wrap this in a puppet type and have the installer call it:

foreman_pki_bundle { 'foreman':
  ensure => present,
}

The user should not have to remember this if they just want a simple install and the installer should error out if a bundle is not present/invalid etc.

It would be useful if list provides the bundles that are present in an easy to parse format. Some tools have a --json switch and that would make it easy to parse. In particular list will benefit from this.

36

Formatting issues from copying this over since it was a longer draft, I’ll try to fix them.

Yea, the default is get the hostname from the system you run the command on, but there is an option to set the CN yourself:

root@foreman foreman_pki (master)$ scl enable tfm 'bundle exec ./bin/foreman-pki generate --help'
Usage:
    foreman-pki generate [OPTIONS]

Options:
    --common-name COMMON_NAME    Specify the common name (CN) for certificate (defaults to current hostname)
    --force                      Forces generation of certificates even if they already exist. Should be used if changing CA's but must be used with extreme cauation.
    -h, --help                   print help

The same is true for exports:

root@foreman foreman_pki (master)$ scl enable tfm 'bundle exec ./bin/foreman-pki export --help'
Usage:
    foreman-pki export [OPTIONS]

Options:
    --common-name COMMON_NAME    Specify the common name (CN) for exported certificates to have (required)
    --bundle BUNDLE              Specify the certificate bundle to export (required)
    --force                      Forces generation of certificates even if they already exist. Should be used if changing CA's but must be used with extreme cauation.
    -h, --help                   print help

Do we care that bundle is present or the certificates are present? I was thinking more the latter since that’s how the modules work today and provides the most flexibility for pure module users. The installer can generate these either within the puppet layer or the hooks layer. The hooks layer made sense to me to match a pure module use case and can be straight forward. One issue with today’s implementation of Katello’s certificate handling is there is multiple layers that make it complex to debug and change (i.e. python tool, puppet providers, puppet defines, puppet classes, puppet module).

We may find we want more granular bundles as well, e.g. breaking Katello’s (https://github.com/ehelms/foreman_pki/blob/master/bundles/katello.yaml) into Pulp and Candlepin bundles to use on say a smart proxy with Pulp.

37

I think we do. Mainly because I think that Apache refusing to start up is a lot harder to debug than a clear ‘Failed to ensure certificate bundle’.

We need to experiment with this. I think the current certs module doesn’t have a good API so there’s room for improvement, but I don’t know how far we can go.

38

Sure!

Is there one in particular you have an interest in if I were to pick one to build and test this strategy against?

39

Yes, as we use FreeIPA to manage our internal PKI, FreeIPA/certmonger integration, (at least for user/services communications, with exception of subscription management related certificates) should be nice to have for us.

40

Reviving this thread, after reading through it all again, I thought I would put forth a view from the users interface to ensure I capture the relevant use cases. My goal then is if we agree on the use cases and the user interfaces I can move to the next layer of design.

Workflow Description Interface
Default installation Default installation. Sets up CA certificate and private key, generates server certificate and private key and inputs to puppet modules. Candlepin would use a self-signed CA to issue client certificates. foreman-installer
Installation with user provided certificate User has generated a server certificate, and private key from their own CA and gives it as input along with the CA certificate. Candlepin would use a self-signed CA to issue client certificates. Alternative workflow: User generates a private key and CSR on the host, user then gets a certificate issued for the host. User then inputs the certificate, private key and CA certificate to the installer. foreman-installer --ssl-certificate <cert path> --ssl-private-key <key path> --ssl-ca-certificate <ca-cert path>
Installation with user provided certificate and intermediate CA certificate and private key for Candlepin Similar to scenario #2. Difference here is user has also generated an intermediate CA key-pair to give to the installer along with the private key for use by Candlepin directly. foreman-installer --ssl-certificate <cert path> --ssl-private-key <key path> --ssl-ca-certificate <ca-cert path> --candlepin-ca-certificate <ca-key path> --candlepin-ca-key <ca-key path>
User registers an existing host User generates a private key and a certificate signing request (CSR). User registers a host with a certificate signing request and gets back a certificate as part of the global registration workflow. curl "http://foreman.example.com/register
Provisioning a new host User provisions a new host and uses the issue_certificate macro to fetch a certificate for the provisioned host from their CA Issue_certificate template macro
3 Likes