Vault Transit in GKE

Portworx can be integrated with Vault Transit to encrypt volumes. This page guides you to connect a Portworx cluster to a Vault development server and enable Vault Transit, which can be used to store secrets for encrypting volumes.

What is Vault Transit?

Vault Transit manages key generation for in-transit data encryption. With Vault Transit, you do not need to set a cluster wide secret to encrypt volumes and PVCs. By default, Portworx uses generated keys from Vault Transit as passphrase for volume encryption.

Prerequisites

• Vault is installed
• Vault environment is configured

Configure Vault Transit environment

1. Run the following command to enable the Transit secrets engine:

vault secrets enable transit

2. If you configured Vault strictly with policies, then the Vault Transit token provided to Portworx should follow the following policies:

# Enable transit secrets engine
path "sys/mounts/transit" {
  capabilities = [ "create", "read", "update", "delete", "list" ]
}

# To read enabled secrets engines
path "sys/mounts" {
  capabilities = [ "read" ]
}

# Manage the transit secrets engine
path "transit/*" {
  capabilities = [ "create", "read", "update", "delete", "list" ]
}

# Read and List capabilities on mount to determine which version of kv backend is supported
path "sys/mounts/*"
{
capabilities = ["read", "list"]
}

# V1 backends (Using default backend)
# Provide full access to the portworx subkey
path "secret/*"
{
capabilities = ["create", "read", "update", "delete", "list"]
}

# V1 backends (Using custom backend)
# Provide full access to the portworx subkey
# Provide -> VAULT_BACKEND_PATH=custom-backend (required)
path "custom-backend/*"
{
capabilities = ["create", "read", "update", "delete", "list"]
}
# V2 backends (Using default backend )
# Provide full access to the data/portworx subkey
path "secret/data/*"
{
capabilities = ["create", "read", "update", "delete", "list"]
}
# V2 backends (Using custom backend )
# Provide full access to the data/portworx subkey
# Provide -> VAULT_BACKEND_PATH=custom-backend (required)
path "custom-backend/data/*"
{
capabilities = ["create", "read", "update", "delete", "list"]
}

Set the Vault Transit secrets engine for Portworx

Depending on whether you are performing a fresh install or modifying an existing installation, proceed to one of the following sections.

New Installation

When generating the Portworx specification file, select Vault Transit from the Secrets Store Type dropdown menu of Advanced Settings on the Customize tab.

Existing Installation

Edit the StorageCluster object by setting the value of the specs.secretsProvider field to vault-transit.

spec:
  secretsProvider: vault-transit

Editing Operator spec will restart all Portworx pods.

Authenticate Portworx

Use one of the supported methods to authenticate Portworx with Vault Transit.

(Optional) Customize the key path

Vault Transit generates the keys by writing to a transit key path. For example:

$ vault write -f transit/keys/my-key
Success! Data written to: transit/keys/my-key

By default, Portworx uses transit key path pwx-encryption-key (full path: transit/keys/pwx-encryption-key) for key generation. To customize the key path with Vault Transit, specify the path as a base64 encoded string in px-vault Secret object.

VAULT_ENCRYPTION_KEY: pwx-test-key

note

Portworx does not recommend changing the value of VAULT_ENCRYPTION_KEY once deployed as the previous secret keys and volumes might be inoperative if the key path is changed.

Set cluster wide secret key (Optional)

A cluster wide secret key is a common key that you can use to encrypt all your volumes. Run the following command to set the cluster secret key:

pxctl secrets set-cluster-key --secret <cluster-wide-secret-key>

You should run this command only once for the cluster. If you added the cluster secret key through the config.json, then the above command overwrites it. Even on subsequent Portworx restarts, the cluster secret key in config.json will be ignored.

Use Vault Transit with Portworx

📄️ Encrypting Kubernetes PVCs with Vault Transit

Instructions on using Vault Transit with Portworx for encrypting PVCs in Kubernetes