On 09/01/2015 10:57 AM, Clark, Robert Graham wrote:
The reason that is compelling is that you can have Barbican generate,
sign, and store a keypair without transmitting the private key over the
network to the client that originates the signing request. It can be
directly stored, and made available only to the clients that need access
to it.
This is absolutely _not_ how PKI for TLS is supposed to work, yes Barbican
can create keypairs etc because sometimes that¹s useful but in the
public-private PKI model that TLS expects this is completely wrong. Magnum
nodes should be creating their own private key and CSR and submitting them
to some CA for signing.
Now this gets messy because you probably don¹t want to push keystone
credentials onto each node (that they would use to communicate with
Barbican).
I¹m a bit conflicted writing this next bit because I¹m not particularly
familiar with the Kubernetes/Magnum architectures and also because I¹m one
of the core developers for Anchor but here goesŠ.
Have you considered using Anchor for this? It¹s a pretty lightweight
ephemeral CA that is built to work well in small PKI communities (like a
Kubernetes cluster) you can configure multiple methods for authentication
and build pretty simple validation rules for deciding if a host should be
given a certificate. Anchor is built to provide short-lifetime
certificates where each node re-requests a certificate typically every
12-24 hours, this has some really nice properties like ³passive
revocation² (Think revocation that actually works) and strong ways to
enforce issuing logic on a per host basis.
Anchor or not, I¹d like to talk to you more about how you¹re attempting to
secure Magnum - I think it¹s an extremely interesting project that I¹d
like to help out with.
-Rob
(Security Project PTL / Anchor flunkie)
Let's not reinvent the wheel. I can't comment on what Magnum is doing
but I do know the members of the Barbican project are PKI experts and
understand CSR's, key escrow, revocation, etc. Some of the design work
is being done by engineers who currently contribute to products in use
by the Dept. of Defense, an agency that takes their PKI infrastructure
very seriously. They also have been involved with Keystone. I work with
these engineers on a regular basis.
The Barbican blueprint states:
Barbican supports full lifecycle management including provisioning,
expiration, reporting, etc. A plugin system allows for multiple
certificate authority support (including public and private CAs).
Perhaps Anchor would be a great candidate for a Barbican plugin.
What I don't want to see is spinning our wheels, going backward, or
inventing one-off solutions to a very demanding and complex problem
space. There have been way too many one-off solutions in the past, we
want to consolidate the expertise in one project that is designed by
experts and fully vetted, this is the role of Barbican. Would you like
to contribute to Barbican? I'm sure your skills would be a tremendous
asset.
--
John
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