Encrypt and Decrypt Application Secrets

Objective

This document provides instructions on how to encrypt your application secrets using the F5® Distributed Cloud Services Blindfold and how to decrypt from your vK8s application. To learn more about Blindfold and secrets management, see Blindfold.

The following image illustrates the sequence of actions performed by Distributed Cloud Services in securing the secrets:

Figure: Distributed Cloud Services Blindfold

Using the instructions provided in this guide, you can encrypt application secrets and store them in code or configmap.

Prerequisites

The following prerequisites apply:

• An F5 Distributed Cloud Account. If you do not have an account, see Getting Started with Console.

• An application running on vK8s. If you do not have an application running on vK8s enable Wingman, see Deploy Application.

• The vesctl tool. Download vesctl on your local machine, as it is used to apply the Blindfold to the TLS certificate.

• A minimum of monitor role in the Shared namespace is required.

Workflow

Applying Blindfold to the secret of your cloud application and decrypting using Wingman includes performing the following sequence of actions:

Note: You must download the API credentials in PKCS #12 file format.

Create a Secret Policy

The secret policy allows Wingman running as sidecar in your application access to the secret.

Create a secret policy using the instructions provided in the Secrets Policy document. This example assumes that a policy named demo-secret-policy is created.

Note: Wingman sidecar communicates with Distributed Cloud Services. Therefore, traffic flows from vK8s pods to Distributed Cloud Services.

Wingman sidecar container will not be injected automatically for workloads in non-F5 Distributed Cloud/customer namespaces on CE sites. Although existing workloads in non-F5 Distributed Cloud namespace will continue to run Wingman even after upgrade until there are some changes in workloads which triggers re-creation of pods. If such workloads have dependency on Wingman then they must include following annotation in pod template of the workload: ves.io/wingman-injection-mode": "enable".

Prepare Credentials and Policy

openssl pkcs12 -nokeys -in demo-api-credentials.p12 -out demo-api.crt

openssl pkcs12 -nocerts -nodes -in demo-api-credentials.p12 -out demo-api.key

vesctl --cert file:///demo-api.crt --key file:///demo-api.key -u https://demo-api.console.ves.volterra.io/api request secrets get-public-key > demo-api-pubkey

data:
  keyVersion: 1
  modulusBase64:   rc3DxZa69sWeIn9NRrHGcZlZaXLHWYjc57jIS76Z47AcU0jDmodz3lNEysVO2swNAUn8p6yiuvf8Vj4LUuWB++LdP2yYX5ftEHmMgnHVq4AdKFBp5zbrh15g7mS0lpdX/xG6h0+IdHyrWPoIg/hZwYyV9xmIOcFc1Jk5PZC554hchHbToQ==
  publicExponentBase64: A6ur/Xk=
  tenant: volterra-demo1

vesctl --cert file:///demo-api.crt --key file:///demo-api.key -u https://demo-api.console.ves.volterra.io/api request secrets get-policy-document --namespace volterra-demo --name demo-secret-policy > demo-secret-policy

data:
  name: demo-secret-policy
  namespace: volterra-demo
  policyId: "101"
  policyInfo:
    rules:
    - action: ALLOW
      clientSelector:
        expressions:
        - app = demo-tls-server
  tenant: volterrra-demo1

Encrypt Application Secret Using Blindfold

Use vesctl to encrypt secret using Blindfold and store the returned encrypted secret for using it in the application.

This is secret data that should only be seen by the application pod:

cat secretfile.data

This example stores the output to a file named secret.enc:

vesctl --cert file:///demo-api.crt --key file:///demo-api.key -u https://demo-api.console.ves.volterra.io/api request secrets encrypt --policy-document demo-secret-policy --public-key demo-api-pubkey secretfile.data > secret.enc

Note: Provide the certificate, key, public key, and policy document obtained in the Prepare Credentials and Policy chapter.

The following output capture shows a sample encrypted key:

Encrypted Secret (Base64 encoded):
AAAACWN1c3RvbWVyMQAAAAEAAAAAAAAAaAIAAAAFA6ur/XkAAAEArc3DxZa69sWeIn9NRrHGcZlZaXLHWYjc57jIS76Z47AcU0jDmodz3lNEysVO2s

This encrypted secret can be provided to the application pod via several means - put the encrypted secret in code, provided via configmap, provided via Kubernetes secret, etc.

Decrypt Application Secret

The application needs to make a REST call to Wingman (running a REST server on localhost:8070) to decrypt the secret. API specifications are specified here.

cat input.json

{
  "type": "blindfold",
  "location": "string:///AAAACWN1c3RvbWVyMQAAAAEAAAAAAAAAaAIAAAAFA6ur/XkAAAEArc3DxZa69sWeIn9NRrHGcZlZaXLHWYjc57jIS76Z47AcU0jDmodz3lNEysVO2s"
}

The following is an example curl request and output:

curl -XPOST http://localhost:8070/secret/unseal -d @input.json
VGhpcyBpcyBzZWNyZXQgZGF0YSB0aGF0IHNob3VsZCBvbmx5IGJlIHNlZW4gYnkgYXBwbGljYXRpb24gcG9kLg==

The output of the REST call is a decrypted secret in Base64 encoding format. If we get the original secret back, perform Base64 decoding of the output string value.

This is secret data that should only be seen by the application pod:

echo "VGhpcyBpcyBzZWNyZXQgZGF0YSB0aGF0IHNob3VsZCBvbmx5IGJlIHNlZW4gYnkgYXBwbGljYXRpb24gcG9kLg==" | base64 -D

Enable Wingman

Wingman sidecar will not be available by default to customer pods. Wingman sidecar injection can be optionally enabled if Distributed Cloud secrets management services is needed.

The following is an example:

spec:
  template:
    metadata:
      annotations:
        ves.io/wingman-injection-mode: enable

Note: Wingman sidecar was previously available by default, and it will be available until an application restarts. If an application needs Wingman sidecar then above annotation is needed in pod template before an upgrade or pod restarts.

Concepts

• System Overview
• Core Concepts
• Virtual Host
• Blindfold

API References

• Virtual Host
• Secret Policy
• Wingman API Reference