Bank Vaults is a thick, tricky, shifty right with a fast and intense tube for experienced surfers only, located on Mentawai. Think heavy steel doors, secret unlocking combinations and burly guards with smack-down attitude. Watch out for clean-up sets.

Bank Vaults is a wrapper for the official Vault client with automatic token renewal, built in Kubernetes support, dynamic database credential management, multiple unseal options, automatic re/configuration and more.

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Bank Vaults is a core building block of the Pipeline PaaS. Some of the usage patterns are highlighted through these blog posts:

Securing Kubernetes deployments with Vault:

• Authentication and authorization of Pipeline users with OAuth2 and Vault
• Dynamic credentials with Vault using Kubernetes Service Accounts
• Dynamic SSH with Vault and Pipeline
• Secure Kubernetes Deployments with Vault and Pipeline
• Vault Operator
• Vault unseal flow with KMS

We use Vault across our large Kubernetes deployments and all the projects were reinventing the wheel. We have externalized all the codebase into this project and removed all the Pipeline and Hollowtrees dependencies thus this project can be used independently as a CLI tool to manage Vault, a Golang library to build upon (OAuth2 tokens, K8s auth, Vault operator, dynamic secrets, cloud credential storage, etc), Helm chart for a HA cluster, operator and a collection of scripts to support some advanced features (dynamic SSH, etc).

We take bank-vaults' security and our users' trust very seriously. If you believe you have found a security issue in bank-vaults, please contact us at [email protected].

Table of Contents

• The CLI tool
• The Go library
• Helm Chart
• Operator
• Examples
• Getting and Installing
• Credits

The CLI tool

The bank-vaults CLI tool is to help automate the setup and management of HashiCorp Vault.

Features:

• Initializes Vault and stores the root token and unseal keys in one of the followings:
  • AWS KMS keyring (backed by S3)
  • Azure Key Vault
  • Google Cloud KMS keyring (backed by GCS)
  • Alibaba Cloud KMS (backed by OSS)
  • Kubernetes Secrets (should be used only for development purposes)
  • Dev Mode (useful for vault server -dev dev mode Vault servers)
• Automatically unseals Vault with these keys
• Continuously configures Vault with a YAML/JSON based external configuration (besides the standard Vault configuration)
  • If the configuration is updated Vault will be reconfigured
  • It supports configuring Vault secret engines, auth methods, and policies

Example external Vault configuration

# Allows creating policies in Vault which can be used later on in roles
# for the Kubernetes based authentication.
# See https://www.vaultproject.io/docs/concepts/policies.html for more information.
policies:
  - name: allow_secrets
    rules: path "secret/*" {
             capabilities = ["create", "read", "update", "delete", "list"]
           }

# Allows configuring Auth Methods in Vault (Kubernetes and GitHub is supported now).
# See https://www.vaultproject.io/docs/auth/index.html for more information.
auth:
  # Allows creating roles in Vault which can be used later on for the Kubernetes based
  # authentication.
  # See https://www.vaultproject.io/docs/auth/kubernetes.html#creating-a-role for
  # more information.
  - type: kubernetes
    roles:
      # Allow every pod in the default namespace to use the secret kv store
      - name: default
        bound_service_account_names: default
        bound_service_account_namespaces: default
        policies: allow_secrets
        ttl: 1h

  # Allows creating team mappings in Vault which can be used later on for the GitHub 
  # based authentication.
  # See https://www.vaultproject.io/docs/auth/github.html#configuration for
  # more information.
  - type: github
    config:
      organization: banzaicloud
    map:
      # Map the banzaicloud dev team on GitHub to the dev policy in Vault
      teams:
        dev: dev
      # Map myself to the root policy in Vault
      users:
        bonifaido: root

  # Allows creating roles in Vault which can be used later on for AWS 
  # IAM based authentication.
  # See https://www.vaultproject.io/docs/auth/aws.html for
  # more information.
  - type: aws
    config:
      access_key: VKIAJBRHKH6EVTTNXDHA
      secret_key: vCtSM8ZUEQ3mOFVlYPBQkf2sO6F/W7a5TVzrl3Oj
      iam_server_id_header_value: vault-dev.example.com # consider setting this to the Vault server's DNS name 
    roles:
    # Add roles for AWS instances or principals
    # See https://www.vaultproject.io/api/auth/aws/index.html#create-role
    - name: dev-role-iam
      bound_iam_principal_arn: arn:aws:iam::123456789012:role/dev-vault
      policies: allow_secrets
      period: 1h

# Allows configuring Secrets Engines in Vault (KV, Database and SSH is tested,
# but the config is free form so probably more is supported).
# See https://www.vaultproject.io/docs/secrets/index.html for more information.
secrets:
  # This plugin stores database credentials dynamically based on configured roles for
  # the MySQL database.
  # See https://www.vaultproject.io/docs/secrets/databases/mysql-maria.html for
  # more information.
  - path: secret
    type: kv
    description: General secrets.
    options:
      version: 1

  # This plugin stores arbitrary secrets within the configured physical storage for Vault.
  # See https://www.vaultproject.io/docs/secrets/kv/index.html for
  # more information.
  - type: database
    description: MySQL Database secret engine.
    configuration:
      config:
        - name: my-mysql
          plugin_name: "mysql-database-plugin"
          connection_url: "{{username}}:{{password}}@tcp(127.0.0.1:3306)/"
          allowed_roles: [pipeline]
          username: "${env "ROOT_USERNAME"}" # Example how to read environment variables
          password: "${env "ROOT_PASSWORD"}"
      roles:
        - name: pipeline
          db_name: my-mysql
          creation_statements: "GRANT ALL ON *.* TO '{{name}}'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY '{{password}}';"
          default_ttl: "10m"
          max_ttl: "24h"

  # Create a named Vault role for signing SSH client keys.
  # See https://www.vaultproject.io/docs/secrets/ssh/signed-ssh-certificates.html#client-key-signing for
  # more information.
  - type: ssh
    path: ssh-client-signer
    description: SSH Client Key Signing.
    configuration:
      config:
        - name: ca
          generate_signing_key: "true"
      roles:
        - name: my-role
          allow_user_certificates: "true"
          allowed_users: "*"
          key_type: "ca"
          default_user: "ubuntu"
          ttl: "24h"

The Go library

This repository contains several Go packages for interacting with Vault:

• auth

  A GitHub OAuth2 based authentication system as a Gin Middleware, stores JWT bearer tokens in Vault.

  

• vault

  A wrapper for the official Vault client with automatic token renewal, and Kubernetes support.

  

• database

  A helper for creating database source strings (MySQL/PostgreSQL) with database credentials dynamically based on configured Vault roles (instead of username:password).

  

Helm Chart

We have a fully fledged, production ready Helm chart for Vault using bank-vaults. With the help of this chart you can run a HA Vault instance with automatic initialization, unsealing and external configuration which used to be a tedious manual operation. This chart can be used easily for development purposes as well.

Operator

We have a Vault operator built on bank-vaults features as:

• external, API based configuration (secret engines, auth methods, policies) to automatically re/configure a Vault cluster
• automatic unsealing (AWS, GCE, Azure, Alibaba, Kubernetes Secrets (for dev purposes), Oracle)
• TLS support

The operator flow is the following:

The source code can be found inside the operator directory.

Deploying the operator

kubectl apply -f operator/deploy/rbac.yaml
kubectl apply -f operator/deploy/operator.yaml

This will createa a Kubernetes CustomResourceDefinition called Vault.

A documented example of this CRD can be found in deploy/cr.yaml.

Examples

Some examples are in cmd/examples/main.go

• Vault client example
• Dynamic secrets for MySQL example with Gorm
• JWTAuth tokens example with a Gin middleware

Getting and Installing

go get github.com/banzaicloud/bank-vaults/cmd/bank-vaults

Cloud permissions

The bank-vaults CLI command needs certain cloud permissions to function properly (init, unseal, configuration).

Google Cloud

The Service Account in which the Pod is running has to have the following IAM Roles:

• Cloud KMS Admin
• Cloud KMS CryptoKey Encrypter/Decrypter
• Storage Admin

A CLI example how to run bank-vaults based Vault configuration on Google Cloud:

bank-vaults configure --google-cloud-kms-key-ring vault --google-cloud-kms-crypto-key bank-vaults --google-cloud-kms-location global --google-cloud-storage-bucket vault-ha --google-cloud-kms-project continual-flow-276578

Azure

The Access Policy in which the Pod is running has to have the following IAM Roles:

• Key Vault All Key permissions
• Key Vault All Secret permissions

AWS

The Instance profile in which the Pod is running has to have the following IAM Policies:

• KMS: kms:Encrypt, kms:Decrypt
• S3: s3:GetObject, s3:PutObject

Alibaba Cloud

A CLI example how to run bank-vaults based Vault unsealing on Alibaba Cloud:

bank-vaults unseal --mode alibaba-kms-oss --alibaba-access-key-id ${ALIBABA_ACCESS_KEY_ID} --alibaba-access-key-secret ${ALIBABA_ACCESS_KEY_SECRET} --alibaba-kms-region eu-central-1 --alibaba-kms-key-id ${ALIBABA_KMS_KEY_UUID} --alibaba-oss-endpoint oss-eu-central-1.aliyuncs.com --alibaba-oss-bucket bank-vaults

Kubernetes

The Service Account in which the Pod is running has to have the following Roles rules:

rules:
- apiGroups: [""]
  resources: ["secrets"]
  verbs:     ["get", "create", "update"]

Credits

Kudos to HashiCorp for open sourcing Vault and making secret management easier and more secure.