ssl-key-vault cookbook

This cookbook manages OpenSSL key pairs, using chef-vault to share and store private keys.

This cookbook's home is at https://github.com/3ofcoins/ssl-key-vault/

Requirements

Usage

1. Generate a self-signed key or a secret key and certificate.

2. Store the private key in chef-vault. The name should be set to ssl-key-key.name.:

   $ knife encrypt cert \ --search 'QUERY' --admins '' \ --name ssl-key-example.com \ --cert /path/to/example.com.key $ knife upload data_bags/certs

Either add Chef server's admin API users to the --admins, or make the key otherwise accessible to yourself in future (e.g. with knife-briefcase).

1. Add the certificate to node's ssl_certificates attribute (key is key's name, and value is full certificate):

example_com_cert = <<EOF
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
...
-----END CERTIFICATE-----
EOF

default_attributes :ssl_certificates => {
  'example.com' => example_com_cert
}

If you don't want to clutter your role definition, you can read the certificate from file in the chef repo:

default_attributes :ssl_certificates => {
  'example.com' => Pathname.new(__FILE__).dirname.join('../config/certificates/example.com.crt').read
}

1. Add recipe[ssl-key-vault] to node's run list.

The key will be stored in /etc/ssl/private/key.name.key, and certificate in /etc/ssl/certs/key.name.pem.

Multiple certificate files

If you need to store certificate and chain separately, or store public part in multiple files for any other reason, the ssl_certificates entry can also be a dictionary, where key is extension of the file in /etc/ssl/certs, and value is the file's content.

certificates = Pathname.new(__FILE__).dirname.join('../config/certificates')
default_attributes :ssl_certificates => {
  'example.com' => {
    'crt' => certificates.join('example.com.crt').read,
    'chain.pem' => certificates.join('example.com.chain.pem).read,
  }
}

In this example, files /etc/ssl/certs/example.com.crt and /etc/ssl/certs/example.com.chain.pem will be created.

TODOs & questions

Maybe we should store certificate somewhere else than in attributes? knife-vault supports only one value, and certificate is public, so it shouldn't be encrypted. Creating a separate data bag seems to create a lot of clutter, and is not easy to describe in Usage section, as it needs to be encoded in JSON. Adding it to cookbook's files/ is also kind of messy.

Maybe the answer would be to script adding a new key. A knife plugin or at least a Thor task definition may be helpful here.

I don't have much of idea currently how to add tests, with chef-vault, encrypted data bags, and such.

Author

Author:: Maciej Pasternacki maciej@3ofcoins.net