Re: Transient secrets

2022-07-13 Diskussionsfäden Markus Köberl via linux-fai
Diese Nachricht wurde eingewickelt um DMARC-kompatibel zu sein. Die eigentliche Nachricht steht dadurch in einem Anhang. This message was wrapped to be DMARC compliant. The actual message text is therefore in an attachment.--- Begin Message --- On Thursday, 7 July 2022 08:12:54 CEST Diego Zuccato

Re: Transient secrets

2022-07-12 Diskussionsfäden Robert Markula
We distribute secrets via configuration management (in our case, via Cfengine). During the first reboot after FAI the Cfengine client registers itself to the Cfengine server and pulls its credentials from a dedicated part of the repository. In Cfengine, it is possible to restrict the allowed

Re: Transient secrets

2022-07-07 Diskussionsfäden Steffen Grunewald
On Thu, 2022-07-07 at 11:16:33 +0200, Diego Zuccato wrote: > Now I only have to figure out how to reliably detect its presence during > install, then it's just matter of copying files. Give each USB key a (filesystem) label, and check for its presence in /dev/disk/by-partlabel - you could even

Re: Transient secrets

2022-07-07 Diskussionsfäden Diego Zuccato
The more I think about it, the more I convince myself that an USB key (preferably connected to the internal USB connector) could be quite a good compromise: cannot be stolen too easily (requires opening the chassis), can be installed w/o requiring special skills, is cheap, and stores "more

Re: Transient secrets

2022-07-07 Diskussionsfäden Andrew Ruthven
Hey, Yes, agreed, depends on the use case. For the gear I'm dealing with they're on physically very secure networks and NFS is firewalled off. You could potentially have a kernel token as you suggest and then go to fetch the secrets from a HashiCorp Vault with an approval needing to be issued.

Re: Transient secrets

2022-07-07 Diskussionsfäden Diego Zuccato
Hi Andrew. That's an option, but is seems less secure: while PXE net have to be quite "locked down", NFS could potentially be exposed on a "public" network (say to handle reinstalls on many networks with a single server). If only machines had an "attestation key" by default... Maybe an USB key

Re: Transient secrets

2022-07-07 Diskussionsfäden Andrew Ruthven
Hey, I'm not sure if this is preferred or not, but the approach I take is to have a command we run first, that copies any required secrets (and will generate SSH host keys and puppet certs if required first) into the NFS root. A cron job runs every 15 minutes and cleans up any of those secrets