This repository contains scaffolding to make standing up a full sigstore stack easier and automatable. Our focus is on running on Kubernetes and rely on several primitives provided by k8s as well as some semantics.

Ville Aikas <[email protected]>

Nathan Smith <[email protected]>

2022-01-11

If you do not care about the nitty gritty details and just want to stand up a local stack, check out the Getting Started Guide If you want to just run sigstore in your GitHub actions, check out the actions. If you want to stand up a sigstore stack on GCP using Terraform, we also got you covered there.

This repository is meant to make it easier to test projects that utilize sigstore by making it easy to spin up a whole sigstore stack in a k8s cluster so that you can do proper integration testing. With the provided action it's easy also to add this capability to your GitHub Action testing.

If you are interested in figuring out the nitty/gritty manual way of standing up a sigstore stack, a wonderful very detailed document for standing all the pieces from scratch is given in Luke Hinds’ “Sigstore the hard way”

If you are interested in standing up a stack on your local machine, a great documentation for all of them are provided by Thomas Strömberg "sigstore-the-local-way"

This document is meant to describe what pieces have been built and why. The goals are to be able to stand up a fully functional setup suitable for k8s clusters, including KinD, which various projects use in our GitHub actions for integration testing.

Because we assume k8s is the environment that we run in, we make use of a couple of concepts provided by it that make automation easier.

• Jobs - Run to completion abstraction. Creates pods, if they fail, will recreate until it succeeds, or finally gives up.
• ConfigMaps - Hold arbitrary configuration information
• Secrets - Hold secrety information, but care must be taken for these to actually be secret

By utilizing the Jobs “run to completion” properties, we can construct “gates” in our automation, which allows us to not proceed until a Job completes successfully (“full speed ahead”) or fails (fail the test setup and bail). These take a form of using kubectl wait command, for example, waiting for jobs in ‘mynamespace’ to complete within 5 minutes or fail.:

kubectl wait --timeout 5m -n mynamespace --for=condition=Complete jobs --all

Another k8s concept we utilize is the ability to mount both ConfigMaps and Secrets into Pods. Furthermore, if a ConfigMap or Secret (and more granularly a ‘key’ in either, but it’s not important) is not available, the Pod will block starting. This naturally gives us another “gate” which allows us to deploy components and rely on k8s to reconcile to a known good state (or fail if it can not be accomplished).

Here’s a high level overview of the components in play that we would like to be able to spin up with the lines depicting dependencies. Later on in the document we will cover each of these components in detail, starting from the “bottom up”.

graph TD
    Client --> Rekor
    Client --> Fulcio
    Client --> TUF
    Client --> TimeStampAuthority
    Fulcio --> CTLog[Certificate Transparency Log]
    Rekor --> |Rekor TreeID|Trillian
    CTLog --> |CTLog TreeID|Trillian
    Trillian --> MySQL
    subgraph k8s
      Fulcio
      TUF
      Rekor
      CTLog
      Trillian
      MySQL
      TimeStampAuthority
    end

Trillian requires a database to work, so we create one using Trillian CI container that has the mysql running, and Trillian schema on it.

Rekor requires a Merkle tree that has been created in Trillian to function. This can be achieved by using the admin grpc client CreateTree call. This again is a Job ‘createtree’ and this job will also create a ConfigMap containing the newly minted TreeID. This allows us to (recall mounting Configmaps to pods from above) to block Rekor server from starting before the TreeID has been provisioned. So, assuming that Rekor runs in Namespace rekor-system and the ConfigMap that is created by ‘createtree’ Job, we can have the following (some stuff omitted for readability) in our Rekor Deployment to ensure that Rekor will not start prior to TreeID having been properly provisioned. Rekor also needs a Signing Key that it will use, and we create one with CreateSecret. It will create two secrets, one holding the Private Signing key as well as the password used to encrypt it with. By default the secret is named rekor-signing-secret and contains two keys:

• signing-secret - Holds the encrypted private key for signing
• signing-secret-password - Holds the password used to encrypt the key above.

That secret then gets mounted / used by Rekor as demonstrated below.

spec:
  template:
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: rekor
        image: gcr.io/projectsigstore/rekor-server@sha256:516651575db19412c94d4260349a84a9c30b37b5d2635232fba669262c5cbfa6
        args: [
          "serve",
          "--trillian_log_server.address=log-server.trillian-system.svc",
          "--trillian_log_server.port=80",
          "--trillian_log_server.tlog_id=$(TREE_ID)",
        ]
        env:
        - name: TREE_ID
          valueFrom:
            configMapKeyRef:
              name: rekor-config
              key: treeID
          - name: SECRET_SIGNING_PWD
            valueFrom:
              secretKeyRef:
                name: rekor-secrets
                key: signing-secret-password
        volumeMounts:
        - name: rekor-secrets
          mountPath: "/var/run/rekor-secrets"
          readOnly: true
      volumes:
      - name: rekor-secrets
        secret:
          secretName: rekor-signing-secret
          items:
          - key: signing-secret
            path: signing-secret

In addition to creating a tree, we will also create a secret holding the public key of the Rekor client that we'll need to be able to construct a proper tuf root later on. This is handled by a rekor createsecret job and it creates a rekor-pub-key secret in the rekor-system namespace holding a single entry in it called public that holds the public key for the Rekor.

For Fulcio we just need to create a Root Certificate that it will use to sign incoming Signing Certificate requests. For this we again have a Job ‘createcerts’ that will create a self signed certificate, private/public keys as well as password used to encrypt the private key. Basically we need to ensure we have all the necessary pieces to start up Fulcio.

This ‘createcerts’ job just creates the pieces mentioned above and creates two Secrets, one called fulcio-secrets containing the following keys:

• cert - Root Certificate
• private - Private key
• password - Password to use for decrypting the private key
• public - Public key

We also create another secret that just holds the public information called pubkeysecret that has two keys:

• cert - Root Certificate
• public - Public key

And as seen already above, we modify the Deployment to not start the Pod until all the pieces are available, making our Deployment of Fulcio look (simplified again) like this.

spec:
  template:
    spec:
      containers:
      - image: gcr.io/projectsigstore/fulcio@sha256:66870bd6b111f3c5478703a8fb31c062003f0127b2c2c5e49ccd82abc4ec7841
        name: fulcio
        args:
          - "serve"
          - "--port=5555"
          - "--ca=fileca"
          - "--fileca-key"
          - "/var/run/fulcio-secrets/key.pem"
          - "--fileca-cert"
          - "/var/run/fulcio-secrets/cert.pem"
          - "--fileca-key-passwd"
          - "$(PASSWORD)"
          - "--ct-log-url=http://ctlog.ctlog-system.svc/e2e-test-tree"
        env:
        - name: PASSWORD
          valueFrom:
            secretKeyRef:
              name: fulcio-secret
              key: password
        volumeMounts:
        - name: fulcio-cert
          mountPath: "/var/run/fulcio-secrets"
          readOnly: true
      volumes:
      - name: fulcio-cert
        secret:
          secretName: fulcio-secret
          items:
          - key: private
            path: key.pem
          - key: cert
            path: cert.pem

CTLog is the first piece in the puzzle that requires a bit more wrangling because it actually has a dependency on Trillian as well as Fulcio that we created above.

For Trillian, we just need to create another TreeID, but we’re reusing the same ‘createtree’ Job from above.

In addition to Trillian, the dependency on Fulcio is that we need to establish trust for the Root Certificate that Fulcio is using so that when Fulcio sends requests for inclusion in our CTLog, we trust it. For this, we use the RootCert API call to fetch the Certificate.

Lastly we need to create a Certificate for CTLog itself.

So in addition to ‘createtree’ Job, we also have a ‘createctconfig’ Job that will fail to make progress until TreeID has been populated in the ConfigMap by the ‘createtree’ call above. Once the TreeID has been created, it will try to fetch a Fulcio Root Certificate (again, failing until it becomes available). Once the Fulcio Root Certificate is retrieved, the Job will then create a Public/Private keys to be used by the CTLog service and will write the following two Secrets (names can be changed ofc):

• ctlog-secrets - Holds the public/private keys for CTLog as well as Root Certificate for Fulcio in the following keys:
  • private - CTLog private key
  • public - CTLog public key
  • rootca - Fulcio Root Certificate
  • config - Serialized Protobuf required by the CTLog to start up.
• ctlog-public-key - Holds the public key for CTLog so that clients calling Fulcio will able to verify the SCT that they receive from Fulcio.

In addition to the Secrets above, the Job will also add a new entry into the ConfigMap (now that I write this, it could just as well go in the secrets above I think…) created by the ‘createtree’ above. This entry is called ‘config’ and it’s a serialized ProtoBuf required by the CTLog to start up.

Again by using the fact that the Pod will not start until all the required ConfigMaps / Secrets are available, we can configure the CTLog deployment to block until everything is available. Again for brevity some things have been left out, but the CTLog configuration would look like so:

spec:
  template:
    spec:
      containers:
        - name: ctfe
          image: ko://github.com/google/certificate-transparency-go/trillian/ctfe/ct_server
          args: [
            "--http_endpoint=0.0.0.0:6962",
            "--log_config=/ctfe-config/ct_server.cfg",
            "--alsologtostderr"
          ]
          volumeMounts:
          - name: keys
            mountPath: "/ctfe-keys"
            readOnly: true
          - name: config
            mountPath: "/ctfe-config"
            readOnly: true
      volumes:
        - name: keys
          secret:
            secretName: ctlog-secret
            items:
            - key: private
              path: privkey.pem
            - key: public
              path: pubkey.pem
            - key: rootca
              path: roots.pem
        - name: config
          secret:
            secretName: ctlog-secret
            items:
            - key: config
              path: ct_server.cfg

Here instead of mounting into environmental variables, we must mount to the filesystem given how the CTLog expects these things to be materialized.

Ok, so with the ‘createtree’ and ‘createctconfig’ jobs having successfully completed, CTLog will happily start up and be ready to serve requests. Again if it fails, tests will fail and the logs will contain information about the particular failure.

Also, the reason why the public key was created in a different secret is because clients will need access to this key because they need that public key to verify the SCT returned by the Fulcio to ensure it actually was properly signed.

TimeStamp Authority (TSA) is a service for issuing RFC 3161 timestamps.

We first create a createcertchain job which will create a Certificate Chain suitable for TSA. For example, the certificate must have usage set to Time Stamping. The jobs creates a secret called tsa-cert-chain in the tsa-system namespace, and as you may have guessed the TSA Server mounts that secret and again won't start until the secret has been created.

Ok, so I lied. We also need to set up a tuf root so that cosign will trust all the pieces we just stood up. The tricky bit here has to do with the fact that sharing secrets across namespaces is not really meant to be done. We could create a reconciler for this, but that would give access to all the secrets in all the namespaces, which is not great, so we'll work around that by having another step where we manually copy the secrets to tuf-system namespace so that we can create a proper tuf root that cosign can use.

There are two steps in the process, first, copy ctlog, fulcio, rekor and TSA public secrets into the tuf-system namespace, followed by a construction of a tuf root from those pieces of information. In addition to that, we'll need to have a tuf web server that serves the root information so that tools like cosign can validate the roots of trust.

For that, we need to copy the following secrets (namespace/secret) with the keys in the secrets into the tuf-system namespace so that the job there has enough information to construct the tuf root:

• fulcio-system/fulcio-pub-key
  • cert - Holds the Certificate for Fulcio
  • public - Holds the public key for Fulcio
• ctlog-system/ctlog-pub-key
  • public - Holds the public key for CTLog
• rekor-system/rekor-pub-key
  • public - Holds the public key for Rekor
• tsa-system/tsa-cert-chain
  • cert-chain - Holds the certificate chain for TimeStamp Authority

Certificate chains for fulcio and TSA can either be provided in a single file or in individual files. When providing as individual files, the following file naming scheme has to be followed:

• <target>_root.crt.pem, e.g. tsa_root.crt.pem
• <target>_intermediate_0.crt.pem, e.g. tsa_intermediate_0.crt.pem
• <target>_intermediate_1.crt.pem, e.g. tsa_intermediate_1.crt.pem
• (more intermediates, but at most 10 intermediate certificates altogether)
• <target>_leaf.crt.pem, e.g. tsa_leaf.crt.pem

Intermediate certificates, if provided, must be ordered correctly: intermediate_0 is signed by root, intermediate_1 is signed by intermediate_0 etc.

Once we have all that information in one place, we can construct a tuf root out of it that can be used by tools like cosign and policy-controller.

This document focused on the Tree management, Certificate, Key and such creation automagically, coordinating the interactions and focusing on the fact that no manual intervention is required at any point during the deployment and relying on k8s primitives and semantics. If you need any customization of where things live, or control any knobs, you might want to look at the helm charts that wrap this repo in a more customizable way.