Ensure compatibility of your Kubernetes Engine certificates - ssl

I received an email from Google Cloud[1] about the usage of X.509 Common Name, which will be not supported anymore, just the X.509 Subject Alternative Name (SAN) fields
1 -
[Action Required] Ensure compatibility of your Kubernetes Engine certificates before upgrading to version 1.23
How can I discover what kind of SSL certificate my application is using?

The Google email is not necessarily referencing your application certificates. It is about certificates used for webhooks inside Kubernetes. This is the announcement from the upstream release notes:
Kubernetes is built using golang 1.17. This version of go removes the ability to use a GODEBUG=x509ignoreCN=0 environment setting to re-enable deprecated legacy behavior of treating the CommonName of X.509 serving certificates as a host name. This behavior has been disabled by default since Kubernetes 1.19 / go 1.15. Serving certificates used by admission webhooks, custom resource conversion webhooks, and aggregated API servers must now include valid Subject Alternative Names. If you are running Kubernetes 1.22 with GODEBUG=x509ignoreCN=0 set, check the apiserver_kube_aggregator_x509_missing_san_total and apiserver_webhooks_x509_missing_san_total metrics for non-zero values to see if the API server is connecting to webhooks or aggregated API servers using certificates that will be considered invalid in Kubernetes 1.23+.
Google also offers a way to check whether this applies to your cluster or not: Ensuring compatibility of webhook certificates before upgrading to v1.23
In case you do not have Google Logging enabled, you can also check the metric apiserver_kube_aggregator_x509_missing_san_total via Prometheus or the k8s API server directly as suggested by this Red Hat Bug Ticket.

Related

Certificate Management in Managed Kubernetes

We are trying to secure our AKS cluster by providing trusted CAs (ssl certs) to Kubernetes Control Plane.
The default API server certificate is issued by while the cluster is created.
Is there any way that we can embed trusted Certificates into the control plane before provisioning the cluster?
Like when we try to reach the kubernetes server it shows ssl certificate issue
To ged rid of this we must be able to add organizations certificates to the api server.
When we create a cluster in Cloud (managed Kubernetes Cluster) we do not have access to the control plane nodes, due to which we won't be able to configure the api server.
Could anyone please help me out figuring out how to add ssl certs to the control plane of kubernetes?
When we create a cluster in Cloud (managed Kubernetes Cluster) we do
not have access to the control plane nodes, due to which we won't be
able to configure the api server.
And that's the biggest inconvenience and pain for everyone who likes anything else except OOB solutions...
My answer is NO. No, unfortunately you cant achieve this in case of AKS usage.
Btw, here also interesting info: Self signed certificates used on management API. Copy paste here for future references despite the fact that answer doesn't help you.
You are correct that per the normal PKI specification dictates use of
non self signed certificates for SSL transport. However, the reason we
do not currently support fully signed certificates is:
Kubernetes requires the ability to self generate and sign certificates Users injecting their own CA is known to be error prone
in Kubernetes as a whole
We are aware of the desire to move away from self signed certificates,
however this requires work in upstream to make this much more likely
to succeed. The official documentation explains a lot of this as well
as the requirements well:
https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/cluster-administration/certificates/
https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/tls/managing-tls-in-a-cluster/
https://kubernetes.io/docs/setup/best-practices/certificates/
Additionally, this post goes in deeper to the issues around cert
management:
https://jvns.ca/blog/2017/08/05/how-kubernetes-certificates-work/

Certificates per cluster or certificate per service provider?

We have service provider that takes a request and creates cluster of elastic search.
What is the best practice to issue ssl certificate ?
1. Should we issue certificate per cluster ?
2. or One cluster for my service provider should be enough which will be used to access clusters ?
I am assuming issuing new certificate while creating cluster is better.
Please provide me the input.
Also, inside the cluster, do I really need to enable ssl so that pods talk to each other passing certificate ?
Yes, you should definitely use TLS to encrypt network traffic to, from, and within your Elasticsearch clusters run on shared and managed K8S version (GKE).
Additionally I would opt for a maximum separation of customer spaces with:
Kubernetes namespaces
namespaced serviceaccounts/rolebindings
and even PD-SSD based volumes with customer supplied encryption keys
I'm not sure if you are aware of existence of 'Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes' (ECK) - it applies Kubernetes Operator pattern for running and operating Elasticsearch clusters on your own K8S cluster in GCP. Treat it also like a collection of a best practices for running Elasticsearch cluster in most secure way, here is a quick start tutorial.

How to set up an architecture of scalable custom domains & auto-SSL on Google Kubernetes Engine

We are researching the best solution to allow customers to use their domain names with our hosting services. The hosting services are based on Google App Engine standard. The requirements are:
Customers can point their domain name to our server via CNAME or A record
Our server should be able to generate SSL certs for them automatically using Let's Encrypt
Our server should be able to handle custom SSL certs uploaded by customers
Should be robust and reliable when adding new customers (new confs, SSL certs etc.) into our servers
Should be scalable, and can handle a large number of custom domains and traffic (e.g. from 0 to 10000)
Minimum operation costs (the less time needed for maintaining the infrastructure, the better)
It seems Google Kubernetes Engine (formerly known as Google Container Engine) would be the direction to go. Is there a specific, proven way to set it up? Any suggestions/experiences sharing would be appreciated.
I would recommend going through this link to get started with setting up a GKE cluster.
For your purpose of SSL on GKE I would recommend creating an Ingress as specified in this link which automatically creates a Loadbalancer Resource in GCP if you use the default GLBC ingress controller. The resulting LB's configuration (Ports, Host Path rules, Certificates, Backend Services, etc. ) are defined by the configuration of the Ingress Object itself. You can point the domain the domain name to the IP of the Loadbalancer.
If you want to configure your Ingress(and consequently the resulting LB) to use certs created by 'Let's Encrypt', you would be modifying the configuration presented in the YAML of the ingress.
For actually integrating Let's Encrypt for Kubernetes, it is actually possible by using a service called cert-manager to automate the process of obtaining TLS/SSL certificates and store them inside secrets.
This link shows how to use cert-manager with GKE.
If you want to use self managed SSL certificates please see this link for more information. The GKE is scalable by the GKE's cluster autoscaler which automatically resizes clusters based on the demands of the workloads you want to run.

Good practices for handling TLS LetsEncrypt with Kubernetes Service

Considering a Nginx reverse-proxy handling TLS LetsEncrypt certificates "in front" of a backend service, what is the good deployment architecture of this setup on Kubernetes ?
My first thought was do make a container with both Nginx and my server in a container as a Stateful Set.
All those stateful sets have access to a volume mounted on /etc/nginx/certificates.
All those containers are running a cron and are allowed to renew those certificates.
However, I do not think it's the best approach. This type of architecture is made to be splited, not running completely independant services everwhere.
Maybe I should run an independent proxy service which handle certificates and does the redirection to the backend server deployment (ingress + job for certificate renewal) ?
If you are using a managed service (such as GCP HTTPS Load Balancer), how do you issue a publicly trusted certificate and renew your it?
You want kube-lego.
kube-lego automatically requests certificates for Kubernetes Ingress resources from Let's Encrypt
It works with GKE+LoadBalancer and with nginx-ingress as well. Usage is trivial; automatic certificate requests (including renewals); uses LetsEncrypt.
The README says -perhaps tongue in the cheek- that you need a non production use case. I have been using it for production and I have found it to be reliable enough.
(Full disclosure: I'm loosely associated with the authors but not paid to advertise the product)

ssl on custom domain for heroku app

I want to connect a custom domain to an app built on Heroku. Can someone confirm that I actually need to buy a certificate and in addition buy the SSL addon on Heroku?
Do I need both or is one of them enough? What is the point of the addon?
/Knut
If you are already using paid dynos (e.g. Hobby dynos) then you can save some costs by using Heroku SSL for free in your app, instead of paying for the SSL Endpoint add on.
This is assuming your app doesn't need to support really old browsers (see Minimum supported browser versions.
These add ons basically provide the protocol support your app needs for SSL with your private domain.
However, regardless of which of the above 2 you choose, you will still need to acquire in addition an SSL certificate. There are all kinds of different offerings for the actual certificate, including free certificates e.g. from Let's Encrypt.
See here for instructions on using a free Let's Encrypt certificate on Heroku with Heroku SSL.
Bottom line: If you are already using paid dynos, it should be possible for you to add full SSL support for your custom Heroku domain for free.
If however you find the above too bewildering, you might want to pay a few bucks for a service such as Expedited SSL, which gives you a certificate (for a monthly fee) and takes care of the whole issue of installing it and keeping it updated on Heroku.
Heroku has made it even easier to use SSL for custom domains now assuming you're not on the free tier plan (if you pay for at least one dyno you're good to go).
https://blog.heroku.com/announcing-automated-certificate-management
Basically, once you have a paid plan for your app., Heroku will generate the certs for you and any custom domains you have added. Then you need to check that you have the right forwarding setup by your domain provider etc.
To add ssl to an existing app you can run:
$ heroku certs:auto:enable -a <app name>
Then run the following command and make sure your custom domains are returned:
$heroku domains