pkisauce

README

PkiSauce

Ephemeral Build Time TLS PKI saucing for your intra services GRPC (or not) communications.

Description

A simple attempt to avoid deploying complex PKI mechanisms, certificates signing, deployment, synchronisation, protecting the CA, etc.. while keeping a consistent and relatively "safe" to use PKI for your internal needs.

The idea is to build a PKI and leverage the common CI/CD dev habits to our advantage, allowing to integrate intra communication low overhead transport security.

While we're using it daily on our projects and we consider it safe for our needs, it is still sort of BETA and a WORK IN PROGRESS, it is NOT polished and not all features are baked in yet. Obviously, we welcome contributions & constructive ideas, that does NOT MEAN every idea or PR will be included or planned.

How it works

Simply, you define your services/elements/daemon and their relationships / interdependence, we define one entity as "daemon" (we're unix folk yes). You then say which one should access which grpc service/RPC call of another defined "daemon". pkisauce will generate the one time use PKI, which includes: the CA,cert/key, services cert/key and the policy code in an interceptor format for the output language supported.

Example myservices.conf:

daemon "servA" path "../cmd/grpc-pkscd" use go-grpc {
	pass "client1" on "Public" rpc any;
	pass "client2" on "Restricted" rpc { "CallThere" };
}

daemon "client1" path "../cmd/grpc-pkscc" use go-grpc {}
daemon "client2" path "../cmd/grpc-pkscc" use go-grpc {}

Run pkisauce myservices.conf to generate the appropriate helpers for your services in golang

see the example directory for an example on how to use it.

Requirements

• golang 1.17+
• gRPC services to use that on (but actually you could build a pem based pki only if you wish)
• the go.mod stuff

Install

go install ermites.io/pkisauce@latest

git clone...
cd pkisauce
go build -a

Features

• mTLS 1.3+ communication.
• no CA to handle (CA is destroyed after the build).
• service communication consistency (avoid version conflicts between builds).
• GRPC service/call granularity.
• Generate TLS host only policies for non GRPC services.
• TLS certificates/keys are using Curve25519.
• TLS certificates/keys are generated, obfuscated & embedded in the generated code.
• TLS certificates/keys are unpacked at runtime.
• Golang GRPC policies are generated in unary interceptor code ready to be embedded your services.
• Golang GRPC call granularity, daemonA can only call daemonB/ServiceX/Call1.
• PEM generation support.
• no additionnal dependencies in the generated code (beside GRPC obviously).

Usage

This will prepare one single Ephemeral PKI composed of pkisauce config files and generate TLS/GRPC helpers to apply the policy defined in those pkisauce conf files.

pkisauce [options] <conf1> <conf2> <conf3> ... <confN> 

all the files provided are considered part of the SAME PKI.

This cannot be applied everywhere.

Stating the obvious, but let's state it to be sure: this cannot be applied everywhere.

The various projects we work(ed) on were always coded, built, shipped & delivered as ONE, multiple layers and multiple services (30+) written, built & deployed as ONE release.

We are BSD people and adopting the BSD stance, in this model & using this tool removed many side effects and potential inconsistencies that could linger during various deployment in an iterative development process.

Also as mentioned earlier we are leveraging the CI/CD iteration habits to constantly update the trust and security of all components in the system, each release cancels out the previous trust and so on; it enforces consistency across all the communication between all clients/services.

The conclusion is: It is NOT adapted for every use case, it is a design choice for having strong transport security with minimal cost/design/deployment overhead.

TODO

• Graph generation (dot, gephy, etc..) for document purposes.
• TLS only policies should NOT include grpc dependencies.
• minimize dependencies.
• certificates properties configuration support (key type?)
• better user controlled data inclusion as well as config/service wide (add user specific data in the generated certs)
• proper debug template of this Ephemeral PKI (list other member of the PKI, only one detailed, etc..)
• java/grpc helpers templates/generator
• c++/grpc helpers templates/generator
• C helpers templates/generator (tls only)
• GRPC persistent connection load balancing included.
• a much better config parse error handling (I am no antlr4 guru tbh...)
• explore the possibility to use go-yacc (as it's sort of part of golang) instead, but it requires an external lexer.. (which is why i tried antlr4, no go-lex or go-flex)
• implement much more comprehensive tests in policy, config and scramble