The Problem#

The problem is how to set up the authentication from Barbican (deployed in the overcloud) and the KRA in a secure and automatable way in a Triple-O deployment.

Currently, the only way to set up Barbican with a Dogtag/IPA back-end is manual. The Dogtag barbican back-end plugin communicates with the KRA directly through certificate authentication using an agent certificate.

There is no automated way to create the agent (especially if we have one agent per overcloud node) or retrieve the certificate for that agent.

Proposed Solution#

The proposed solution takes advantage of the fact that the undercloud is enrolled as an IPA client, and has novajoin deployed on the undercloud. In addition, the overcloud nodes are also enrolled in IPA through novajoin.

As a result, both the overcloud and undercloud nodes have Kerberos host and service credentials that can be used to communicate with IPA.

In this proposed solution, Barbican will interact with the KRA only indirectly through the IPA Vault, rather than going to the KRA directly. This may incur a small performance penalty in having another system in the pipeline, but this is a pipeline which we will need to optimize for many other use cases. Moreover, in future, IPA offers a number of advantages for future refinement (including possibly project level separation at the IPA Vault level).

The solution therefore looks like the following:

Barbican –(1)–> IPA Vault –(2)–> KRA

Interaction (2) is opaque to Barbican, and is currently done through a trusted agent mechanism. In future, we will add GSSAPI integration with the KRA, along with an authz module for IPA specific access rules. This should remain opaque to Barbican though.

Interaction (1) will be done through the IPA Vault python API, using the service kerberos credential for the Barbican service. This service (“barbican/example.com”) will store and retrieve secrets in its own vaults. By IPA access rules, it will not have access to any other secrets in IPA, though access rules may be added by IPA admins to provide access to the secrets by different IPA accounts.

The installation flow will go roughly as follows:

  1. Admin runs a script to enroll undercloud node in IPA, and then executes quickstart.

  2. Undercloud is deployed and novajoin is deployed.

  3. Overcloud nodes are deployed. These have ipa_enroll=True to allow the overcloud nodes to register to IPA through novajoin.

  4. The metadata passed to novajoin also includes managed_services. These are services (like haproxy/overcloud.com for instance) for which novajoin will:

    1. Create the subnode (overcloud.com in this case) if needed by doing a host-add with no otp.

    2. Create the service (haproxy/overcloud.com) if needed by doing a service-add.

    3. Associate the overcloud host principal with the service by doing service_add_host.

  5. The above operations are done using the nova service principal’s credentials, which were previously retrieved using ipa-getkeytab. The nova service user is a member of the the “Nova Management” role, which has all the relevant permissions.

  6. We will pass in one more managed_service: “barbican/example.com” - which will result in the service being created and the overcloud node host principal added to the service.

  7. When the overcloud node comes up, cloud-init runs and enrolls the overcloud node with IPA with the OTP provided by novajoin. The host principal is also retrieved.

  8. puppet modules then run to install the overcloud services, including barbican. The puppet module for Barbican then uses the host principal to retrieve the service keytab for barbican/example.com, and store it in /etc/barbican/barbican.keytab. The puppet module also configures Barbican to interact with the IPA vault.

Steps to get there#

  1. Write an IPA Vault/Barbican plugin. This is basically the same as the Dogtag plugin except we use the barbican service keytab and use vault primitives, rather than the KRA API.

  2. Write puppet code in puppet-barbican to get the Batrbican service keytab and configure Barbican <-> IPA Vault.

  3. Write OOO heat templates to add a barbican metadata service to the managed_services passed to novajoin through the metadata.

  4. It may be necessary to add an additional field to the managed services to NOT delete the service when the last host has been removed. Currently, novajoin-notify will delete the service in this case when notified by nova. This may result in the secrets stored by the service being deleted.