Secrets Management for cilium/cilium.io

Overview

This document provides a detailed guide on how Cilium manages and stores production secrets in a secure and efficient manner. The management of secrets is critical for maintaining integrity, security, and compliance within cloud-native applications.

Best Practices for Secret Management

Use Environment Variables
Store sensitive data such as API keys and passwords in environment variables. This prevents hardcoding secrets into your source code, reducing the risk of unintentional exposure.

Example:
```
process.env.DB_PASSWORD = "your_database_password";
```

Use Container Orchestration Secret Management
Utilize built-in secret management features provided by Kubernetes to store and manage secrets securely.

Example of creating a secret in Kubernetes:

kubectl create secret generic db-secret --from-literal=password='your_database_password'

You can reference this secret in your pod specification as follows:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: my-app
spec:
  containers:
  - name: my-container
    image: my-image
    env:
    - name: DB_PASSWORD
      valueFrom:
        secretKeyRef:
          name: db-secret
          key: password

Encryption at Rest
Ensure that all secrets are encrypted in storage to protect against unauthorized access, even if the storage medium is compromised.
Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)
Implement fine-grained access control using RBAC to restrict access to sensitive secrets based on the user roles within the Kubernetes environment.

Example RBAC policy to allow only specific users to access secrets:
```
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: Role
metadata:
  namespace: your-namespace
  name: secret-reader
rules:
- apiGroups: [""]
  resources: ["secrets"]
  verbs: ["get", "list"]
```
Auditing and Monitoring
Regularly audit access logs for any unauthorized access attempts and monitor applications for suspicious activities related to secret access.

Use Secret Management Tools
Consider integrating secret management tools such as HashiCorp Vault or AWS Secrets Manager for advanced secret management features including rotation and auditing.

Example of integrating with HashiCorp Vault:

Start the Vault server:

vault server -dev

Set up a new secret:

vault kv put secret/myapp/config username='myuser' password='mypassword'

Accessing a secret from your application:

const axios = require('axios');

async function getSecret() {
  const response = await axios.get('http://localhost:8200/v1/secret/myapp/config', {
    headers: {
      'X-Vault-Token': 'your-vault-token'
    }
  });
  console.log(response.data.data);
}
getSecret();

Conclusion

Implementing a robust secrets management strategy is paramount in production environments. Following the best practices outlined in this documentation will help ensure that your application secrets are stored, managed, and accessed securely.

Source: src/posts/2023-01-05-retail-user/index.md, src/posts/2023-04-03-eu-talks/index.md, src/posts/2022-10-13-user-story/index.md, src/posts/2022-10-18-kubecon-talks/index.md