JHipster VS sealed-secrets

An easy way to get a pre-configured Keycloak instance is to use JHipster's jhipster-sample-app-oauth2 application. It gets updated with every JHipster release. You can clone it with the following command:

provider "auth0" { domain = "https://" debug = false } # Create a new Auth0 application for the JHipster app resource "auth0_client" "java_ms_client" { name = "JavaMicroservices" description = "Java Microservices Client Created Through Terraform" app_type = "regular_web" callbacks = ["http://localhost:8080/login/oauth2/code/oidc"] allowed_logout_urls = ["http://localhost:8080"] oidc_conformant = true jwt_configuration { alg = "RS256" } } # Configuring client_secret_post as an authentication method. resource "auth0_client_credentials" "java_ms_client_creds" { client_id = auth0_client.java_ms_client.id authentication_method = "client_secret_post" } # Create roles for the JHipster app resource "auth0_role" "admin" { name = "ROLE_ADMIN" description = "Administrator" } resource "auth0_role" "user" { name = "ROLE_USER" description = "User" } # Create an action to customize the authentication flow to add the roles and the username to the access token claims expected by JHipster applications. resource "auth0_action" "jhipster_action" { name = "jhipster_roles_claim" runtime = "node18" deploy = true code = <<-EOT /** * Handler that will be called during the execution of a PostLogin flow. * * @param {Event} event - Details about the user and the context in which they are logging in. * @param {PostLoginAPI} api - Interface whose methods can be used to change the behavior of the login. */ exports.onExecutePostLogin = async (event, api) => { const namespace = 'https://www.jhipster.tech'; if (event.authorization) { api.idToken.setCustomClaim(namespace + '/roles', event.authorization.roles); api.accessToken.setCustomClaim(namespace + '/roles', event.authorization.roles); } }; EOT supported_triggers { id = "post-login" version = "v3" } } # Attach the action to the login flow resource "auth0_trigger_actions" "login_flow" { trigger = "post-login" actions { id = auth0_action.jhipster_action.id display_name = auth0_action.jhipster_action.name } } # Create a test user. You can create more users here if needed resource "auth0_user" "test_user" { connection_name = "Username-Password-Authentication" name = "Jane Doe" email = "[email protected]" email_verified = true password = "passpass$12$12" # Don't set passwords like this in production! Use env variables instead. lifecycle { ignore_changes = [roles] } } resource "auth0_user_roles" "test_user_roles" { user_id = auth0_user.test_user.id roles = [auth0_role.admin.id, auth0_role.user.id] } output "auth0_webapp_client_id" { description = "Auth0 JavaMicroservices Client ID" value = auth0_client.java_ms_client.client_id } output "auth0_webapp_client_secret" { description = "Auth0 JavaMicroservices Client Secret" value = auth0_client_credentials.java_ms_client_creds.client_secret sensitive = true }

If you want a Spring backend with an Angular Frontend check out https://www.jhipster.tech. This is very nice for CRUD stuff.

Use https://www.jhipster.tech/

To test GitHub Actions, we need a new project which in this case I generated using JHipster with the configuration seen here:

exports.onExecutePostLogin = async (event, api) => { const namespace = 'https://www.jhipster.tech'; if (event.authorization) { api.idToken.setCustomClaim('preferred_username', event.user.email); api.idToken.setCustomClaim(`${namespace}/roles`, event.authorization.roles); api.accessToken.setCustomClaim(`${namespace}/roles`, event.authorization.roles); } }

What you maybe asking for is something like vaadin or jhipster which marries the front with the backend. (I don't like them tbh but it worth mentioning)

You can try this stack https://www.jhipster.tech with generator for mobile app https://github.com/jhipster/generator-jhipster-ionic.

If you have noticed, you are setting secrets in plain text on the application-configmap.yml file, which is not ideal and is not a best practice for security. The best way to do this securely would be to use AWS Secrets Manager, an external service like HashiCorp Vault, or Sealed Secrets. To learn more about these methods see the blog post Shhhh... Kubernetes Secrets Are Not Really Secret!.

Yeah documentation is hard and I'm guilty (as a former maintainer of SealedSecrets)

SealedSecrets was designed with "write only" secrets in mind.

Turns out a lot of people need to access the current secrets because they need to update a part of a "composite" secret.

There are two kinds of "composite" secrets, one easy and one harder, but if you don't know how to do it, even the easier is hard:

1. Secret with multiple data "items" (also called keys in K8s Secret jargon but that's confusing when there is encryption involved). I.e. good old "data":{"foo": "....", "bar": "..."}

2. Secrets where data within one item is actually a config file with cleartext and secrets mixed up in one single string (usually some JSON or YAML or TOML)

Case 1 is "easy" to deal with once you realize that sealed secrets files are just text files and you can just manually merge and update encryoted data items. We even created a "merge" and some "raw" encryption APIs to make that process a little less "copy pasta" but it's still hard to have a good UX that works for everyone.

Case 2 is harder. We did implement a data templating feature that allows you to generate a config file via a go-template that keeps the cleartext parts in clear and uses templating directives to inject the secret parts where you want (referencing the encrypted the items)

The main problem with case 2 is that it's undocumented.

The feature landed in 2021:

https://github.com/bitnami-labs/sealed-secrets/pull/580

I noticed that people at my current $dayjob used sealed secrets for years and it took me a while to understand that the reason they hated it was that they didn't know about that fundamental feature.

And how to blame them!? It's still undocumented!

In my defense I spent so much effort before and after I left VMware to lobby so that the project got the necessary staffing so it wouldn't die of bitrot that I didn't have much time left to work on documentation. Which is a bit said and probably just an excuse :-)

That said, I'm happy that the project is alive and the current maintainers are taking care of it against the forces of entropy. Perhaps some doc work would be useful too. Unfortunately I don't have time for now.

This might be OT, and forgive me, but I think one of the best practices for Encrypting and Managing secrets in Kubernetes is to use Sealed Secrets, they allow your secrets to be securely stored in git with the rest of the configuration and yet no one with access to the Git repository will be able to read them. I say this might be OT, because Sealed Secrets are trying to mitigate a different threat, the threat of the secrets at rest somewhere, and not "live in the cluster", where in theory all the ingredients to decrypt the secrets would still live.

The addition of Consul and Vault gives me a few things. For one, right now I'm handling secrets with a mixture of SOPS and Sealed Secrets. I use Vault in my professional life, and have used both Vault and Consul at my last job. Vault is a beast, so I may as well get better at it; plus its options for secret injection are better.

Use Sealed Secrets Operator.

sealed-secrets (sealed)

An option that easily works with GitOps is the Operator Sealed Secrets from Bitnami. Secrets encrypted with it can only be decrypted by operators running inside the cluster, not even by the original author. For encryption, there is a CLI (and a third-party web UI) that requires a connection to the cluster. The disadvantage of this is that the key material is stored in the cluster, the secrets are bound to the cluster and one has to take care of backups and operation.