Security

There are two types of security that are utilized in Contiv, and are discussed in this section: HTTP and ETCD.

HTTP Security

By default, the access to endpoints (liveness, readiness probe, prometheus stats, …) served by Contiv-vswitch and Contiv-ksr is open to anybody. Contiv-vswitch exposes endpoints using port 9999 and contiv-ksr uses 9191.

To secure access to the endpoints, the SSL/TLS server certificate and basic auth (username password) can be configured.

In Contiv-VPP, this can be done using the Helm charts in k8s/contiv-vpp folder.

To generate server certificate the approach described in ETCD security can be leveraged.

ETCD Security

By default, the access to Contiv-VPP ETCD is open to anybody. ETCD gets deployed on the master node, on port 12379, and is exposed using the NodePort service on port 32379, on each node.

To secure access to ETCD, we recommend using the SSL/TLS certificates to authenticate both the client and server side, and encrypt the communication. In Contiv-VPP, this can be done using the Helm charts in k8s/contiv-vpp folder.

The prerequisite for that is the generation of SSL certificates.

Generate Self-Signed Certificates

In order to secure ETCD, we need to create our own certificate authority, and then generate the private keys and certificates for both the ETCD server and ETCD clients.

This guide uses CloudFlare’s cfssl tools to do this job. It follows the steps described in this CoreOS guide.

Perform the following steps to generate private keys and certificates:

1. Install cfssl

mkdir ~/bin
curl -s -L -o ~/bin/cfssl https://pkg.cfssl.org/R1.2/cfssl_linux-amd64
curl -s -L -o ~/bin/cfssljson https://pkg.cfssl.org/R1.2/cfssljson_linux-amd64
chmod +x ~/bin/{cfssl,cfssljson}
export PATH=$PATH:~/bin

2. Initialize a Certificate Authority

echo '{"CN":"CA","key":{"algo":"rsa","size":2048}}' | cfssl gencert -initca - | cfssljson -bare ca -
echo '{"signing":{"default":{"expiry":"43800h","usages":["signing","key encipherment","server auth","client auth"]}}}' > ca-config.json

3. Generate Server Key + Certificate

Replace the IP address 10.0.2.15 below with the IP address of your master node:

export ADDRESS=127.0.0.1,10.0.2.15
export NAME=server
echo '{"CN":"'$NAME'","hosts":[""],"key":{"algo":"rsa","size":2048}}' | cfssl gencert -config=ca-config.json -ca=ca.pem -ca-key=ca-key.pem -hostname="$ADDRESS" - | cfssljson -bare $NAME

4. Generate Client Key + Certificate

export ADDRESS=
export NAME=client
echo '{"CN":"'$NAME'","hosts":[""],"key":{"algo":"rsa","size":2048}}' | cfssl gencert -config=ca-config.json -ca=ca.pem -ca-key=ca-key.pem -hostname="$ADDRESS" - | cfssljson -bare $NAME

The above commands produce the following files that will be needed in order to secure ETCD:

  • ca.pem: certificate of the certificate authority

  • server.pem: certificate of the ETCD server

  • server-key.pem: private key of the ETCD server

  • client.pem: certificate for the ETCD clients

  • client-key.pem: private key for the ETCD clients

Distribute Certificates and Generate Contiv-VPP Deployment Yaml

There are two options for distributing the certificates to all nodes in a k8s cluster. You can either distribute the certificates manually, or embed the certificates into the deployment yaml file and distribute them as k8s secrets.

Distribute Certificates Manually

In this case, you need to copy the ca.pem, client.pem and client-key.pem files into a specific folder (/var/contiv/etcd-secrets by default) on each worker node. On the master node, you also need to add the server.pem and server-key.pem into that location.

Then you can generate the Contiv-VPP deployment YAML as follows:

cd k8s
helm template --name my-release contiv-vpp --set etcd.secureTransport=True > contiv-vpp.yaml

Then you can go ahead and deploy Contiv-VPP using this yaml file.

Embed the certificates into deployment the yaml and use k8s secret to distribute them {: #Embed-certificates }

In this case, you need to copy all 5 generated files into the folder with helm definitions (k8s/contiv-vpp) and generate the Contiv-VPP deployment YAML as follows:

cd k8s
helm template --name my-release contiv-vpp --set etcd.secureTransport=True --set etcd.secrets.mountFromHost=False > contiv-vpp.yaml

Then just deploy Contiv-VPP using this yaml file.

Please note that the path of the mount folder with certificates, as well as the certificate file names can be customized using the config parameters of the Contiv-VPP chart, as described in this README.