How do you manage the distribution of internal TLS network certificates? I’m using cert-manager to generate them, but the root self-signed certificate expires monthly which makes distribution to devices outside of K8s a challenge. It’s a PITA to keep doing this for the tablet, laptop and phones. I can bump the root cert to a year, but I’m concerned that the date will sneak up on me. Are there any automated solutions?
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Use a secret manager?
Cert is a secret, add a small agent to your containers that pings your secret manager and gets back the current cert. Then saves / imports it (or whatever is appropriate).
For most of my internal services that are sitting behind Traefik I use step-ca which basically gives you a Let’s Encrypt style certificate while working over the local network. The root CA has a long expiry (so might not be what you want if your goal Is a short lived root CA) but the actual certificates for each service are short lived (a touch over 24 hours from memory?)
I tried step-ca to start with, but my primary use case was for certs in the cluster, which cert-manager is more suited for natively. Maybe step-ca has improved, I was using it in the early days. My goal isn’t a short lived cert as much as it is to have an easy configuration and to learn.
MONTHLY?? That’s a bit much, don’t you think?
If you’re regenerating certa that fast, I can’t think of anything that’s going to secure AND easy enough to satisfy automating this.
Whatever tool you want to use to secure the contents of the cert from its initial creation, to distribution, is fine enough. If you want super easy, use an SSH/SCP script. If you want something more elegant, think Hashicorp Vault or etcd.
Ansible is probably more effort than it’s worth (plus securing the secrets of the cert), and any other config mgmt tool won’t deal with the distribution portion simply, so I’d skip all of that.
Yes, monthly is too fast. I’m using a K8s operator for cert-manager which defaults to a month. I think I can patch the CSV with an annotation that will bump that out, but when the operator updates the CSV then I need to repatch it.
I was polling the community to see if there’s something that is easy to use but I was not able to find in my searches. It seems like a common problem.
Part of my problem is that I chose to use a K8s operator for cert-manager which isn’t easy to configure. Had I used a helm chart, i’d have bumped the root cert to 10 years and forgotten about it.