charm-deployment-guide/deploy-guide/source/app-vault.rst

Appendix C: Vault

Overview

Vault provides a secure storage and certificate management service. Integrating vault into an OpenStack deployment involves a few post-deployment steps which have been encapsulated in charm actions.

Vault

Deploy vault

First deploy the vault charm along with supporting services:

juju deploy --to lxd:0 vault
juju add-relation vault percona-cluster

Note

When running on hardware or in KVM, the vault charm will configure vault to enable mlock (memory locking) which ensures that vault won't get swapped out to disk, potentially compromising secrets. Using mlock is not supported in LXD containers and will be automatically disabled.

Vault can make use of the existing Percona XtraDB Cluster deployed to support the rest of the OpenStack applications or could be deployed with a separate instance if required. All data stored is encrypted by vault using its master encryption key.

Vault will deploy and startup in an un-initialized state; For production deployments the unseal keys used to manage the Vault master key used for encryption should be managed from outside of the Juju model hosting vault and the OpenStack Charms.

Note

Production deployments you should also secure vault using the ssl-* configuration options provided by the charm; this ensures that communication with the Vault REST API is always secure as data on the network is also encrypted using TLS encryption.

Initialize and unseal vault

Install the vault snap and configure the VAULT_ADDR environment variable:

sudo snap install vault
export VAULT_ADDR="https://<IP of vault unit>:8200"

and then initialize the vault deployment:

vault operator init -key-shares=5 -key-threshold=3

you should get a response like:

Unseal Key 1: XqeOza3SY6f4L6xfuk6f8JumrEF7cak9mUXCCPRXzs4B
Unseal Key 2: djvVAAste0F5iSe43nmBs2ZX5r+wUqHe4UfUrcprWkyM
Unseal Key 3: iSXHBdTNIKrbd3JIEI+n+q7j04Q4HPsQOHgk7apupttT
Unseal Key 4: J8jzdUi0HOWgx8Ig75Mu8uVQTXkw6yNv2kMhjeNz2/5B
Unseal Key 5: xTJkk3guA9Mq3CYfDhIBevSWrD1CIer6q70HVACMbduc

Initial Root Token: ebded15e-c908-5d3a-1df0-1e7e7218c162

Vault initialized with 5 key shares and a key threshold of 3. Please securely
distribute the key shares printed above. When the Vault is re-sealed,
restarted, or stopped, you must supply at least 3 of these keys to unseal it
before it can start servicing requests.

Vault does not store the generated master key. Without at least 3 key to
reconstruct the master key, Vault will remain permanently sealed!

It is possible to generate new unseal keys, provided you have a quorum of
existing unseal keys shares. See "vault rekey" for more information.

This response details the 5 keys that can be used to unseal the vault deployment and an initial root token for accessing the Vault API.

Warning

Do not lose the unseal keys! It's impossible to unseal vault without them which must be completed after any restart of the vault daemon as part of ongoing maintenance.

Warning

Do not lose the root token! Without it the vault deployment will be inaccessible.

Each vault unit must be individually unsealed, so if there are multiple vault units repeat the unseal process below for each unit changing the VAULT_ADDR environment variable each time to point at the individual units.

vault operator unseal XqeOza3SY6f4L6xfuk6f8JumrEF7cak9mUXCCPRXzs4B
vault operator unseal djvVAAste0F5iSe43nmBs2ZX5r+wUqHe4UfUrcprWkyM
vault operator unseal iSXHBdTNIKrbd3JIEI+n+q7j04Q4HPsQOHgk7apupttT

Authorize vault charm

vault is now ready for use - however the charm needs to be authorized using a root token to be able to create secrets storage back-ends and roles to allow other applications to access vault for encryption key storage.

First generate a one-shot root token with a limited TTL using the initial root token for this purpose:

export VAULT_TOKEN=ebded15e-c908-5d3a-1df0-1e7e7218c162
vault token create -ttl=10m

you should get a response like:

Key                Value
---                -----
token              03ceadf5-529d-6a64-0cfd-1e341b1dacb1
token_accessor     17390537-2012-51dc-93d0-9cc26ba953eb
token_duration     10m
token_renewable    true
token_policies     [root]

This token can then be used to setup access for the charm to Vault:

juju run-action vault/0 authorize-charm token=03ceadf5-529d-6a64-0cfd-1e341b1dacb1

After the action completes execution, the vault unit will go active and any pending requests for secrets storage will be processed for consuming applications.

Enabling HA

The vault charm supports deployment in HA configurations; this requires the use of etcd to provide HA storage to vault units, with access to vault being provided a virtual IP or DNS-HA hostname.

The etcd application needs to support etcd3 so ensure it is using the latest snap channel which supports it:

juju deploy --to lxd:0 vault
juju add-unit --to lxd:1 vault
juju add-unit --to lxd:2 vault
juju config vault vip=10.20.30.1
juju deploy hacluster vault-hacluster
juju add-relation vault vault-hacluster

juju deploy --config channel=3.1/stable --to lxd:0 etcd
juju add-unit --to lxd:1 etcd
juju add-unit --to lxd:2 etcd

juju deploy --to lxd:0 easyrsa  # required for TLS certs for etcd

juju add-relation etcd easyrsa
juju add-relation etcd vault
juju add-relation vault percona-cluster

Only a single vault unit is 'active' at any point in time (reflected in juju status output). Other vault units will proxy incoming API requests to the active vault unit over a secure cluster connection between units.

Note

When deploying vault in HA configurations, all vault units must be unsealed using the unseal keys generated during initialization in order to unlock the master key. This is performed externally to the charm using the Vault API.