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Configuring authorisation and authentication

Authorisation

Charmed Kubernetes implements access control based on the Kubernetes model. A complete overview of the Kubernetes authorisation system is given in the Kubernetes Documentation. This page provides summary information on the available modes and how to configure Charmed Kubernetes to use them.

<span class="p-notification__title">Note:</span>
<p class="p-notification__message">The default authorisation mode in <strong>Charmed Kubernetes</strong> 1.19 has changed from "AlwaysAllow" to "Node,RBAC".</p>

The following modes are supported:

Node (default): Grants permissions to kubelets based on the pods they are scheduled to run. When using this mode, Charmed Kubernetes will enable NodeRestriction and will issue (and decommission) tokens for kubernetes-workers as you scale your infrastructure. More detailed information can be found in the Kubernetes documentation.
RBAC (default): Using role-based access control, access is granted to users based on the roles assigned to them. This mode expects respective roles and bindings to be available for any running services. Charmed Kubernetes already has roles and bindings ready for use (see below).
AlwaysAllow: All calls to the API server are allowed.
AlwaysDeny: This mode denies all API requests - it is only really useful for testing.
ABAC: Using attribute-based access control, access rights are granted to users through the use of policies which combine attributes together. The policies can use any type of attributes (user attributes, resource attributes, object attributes, environment attributes, etc). For more information on ABAC mode, see the Kubernetes ABAC documentation.
Webhook: With this mode set, Kubernetes will query an outside REST service when determining user privileges. This mode requires additional configuration to specify the service being queried. A full explanation of this can be found in the Kubernetes Webhook mode documentation.

Determining the current configuration

Juju can be used to query the current configuration setting:

juju config kubernetes-control-plane authorization-mode

The default value is:

Node,RBAC

For further verification, the runtime arguments for the kube-apiserver can be determined:

juju run --unit kubernetes-control-plane/0 "ps -ef | grep apiserver"

… from which we can see the --authorization-mode=Node,RBAC argument:

root      6244     1 22 17:10 ?        00:00:12 /snap/kube-apiserver/1720/kube-apiserver --allow-privileged=false --service-cluster-ip-range=10.152.183.0/24 --min-request-timeout=300 --v=4 --tls-cert-file=/root/cdk/server.crt --tls-private-key-file=/root/cdk/server.key --kubelet-certificate-authority=/root/cdk/ca.crt --kubelet-client-certificate=/root/cdk/client.crt --kubelet-client-key=/root/cdk/client.key --kubelet-https=true --logtostderr=true --storage-backend=etcd3 --insecure-port=0 --profiling=false --anonymous-auth=false --authentication-token-webhook-cache-ttl=1m0s --authentication-token-webhook-config-file=/root/cdk/auth-webhook/auth-webhook-conf.yaml --service-account-key-file=/root/cdk/serviceaccount.key --kubelet-preferred-address-types=InternalIP,Hostname,InternalDNS,ExternalDNS,ExternalIP --encryption-provider-config=/var/snap/kube-apiserver/common/encryption/encryption_config.yaml --advertise-address=172.31.17.53 --etcd-cafile=/root/cdk/etcd/client-ca.pem --etcd-keyfile=/root/cdk/etcd/client-key.pem --etcd-certfile=/root/cdk/etcd/client-cert.pem --etcd-servers=https://172.31.13.233:2379,https://172.31.30.137:2379,https://172.31.9.235:2379 --authorization-mode=Node,RBAC --enable-admission-plugins=PersistentVolumeLabel,PodSecurityPolicy,NodeRestriction --requestheader-client-ca-file=/root/cdk/ca.crt --requestheader-allowed-names=system:kube-apiserver,client --requestheader-extra-headers-prefix=X-Remote-Extra- --requestheader-group-headers=X-Remote-Group --requestheader-username-headers=X-Remote-User --proxy-client-cert-file=/root/cdk/client.crt --proxy-client-key-file=/root/cdk/client.key --enable-aggregator-routing=true --client-ca-file=/root/cdk/ca.crt --audit-log-path=/root/cdk/audit/audit.log --audit-log-maxage=30 --audit-log-maxsize=100 --audit-log-maxbackup=10 --audit-policy-file=/root/cdk/audit/audit-policy.yaml

Setting a configuration

The authorisation mode can be set using the same Juju command as above, but this time specifying a value:

juju config kubernetes-control-plane authorization-mode="Node"

It is possible to set more than one mode using a comma-separated list:

juju config kubernetes-control-plane authorization-mode="Node,RBAC"

<span class="p-notification__title">Note:</span>
<p class="p-notification__message">Using "Node,RBAC" for authorisation is the recommended configuration.</p>

The order matters. Kubernetes will process each API request with each module in sequence. If the current authorising module either allows or denies the request, that decision is made and no further modules are consulted. If the current module has no opinion on the request, then the decision is passed to the next module in the list. If no decision has been returned by the last module in the list, then the request is denied.

Further information on RBAC

Many of the defined roles (those prefixed by system:) for RBAC are really intended for managing access to Kubernetes components themselves.

The main cluster roles for additional users are: admin, cluster-admin, edit and view.

You can view the available roles, cluster roles and bindings with the following commands:

kubectl get roles --all-namespaces
kubectl get clusterroles --all-namespaces
kubectl get rolebindings --all-namespaces
kubectl get clusterrolebindings --all-namespaces

For more detail on roles and bindings, please see the Kubernetes RBAC documentation.

Authentication

<span class="p-notification__title">Note:</span>
<p class="p-notification__message">The default authentication mechanism in <strong>Charmed Kubernetes</strong> 1.19 has changed from file-based authentication to a webhook token service.</p>

Charmed Kubernetes manages a webhook authentication service that compares API requests to Kubernetes secrets. If needed, any existing entries in previous authentication files (basic_auth.csv and known_tokens.csv) are migrated to secrets during the kubernetes-control-plane charm upgrade.

The webhook authenticator is distributed with the kubernetes-control-plane charm and runs on port 5000 of each control-plane unit. Source code for the application as well as the associated systemd service can be found in the kubernetes-control-plane source repository.

<span class="p-notification__title">Note:</span>
<p class="p-notification__message">Only one webhook authenticator can be configured on the Kubernetes apiserver. To use a custom webhook, see the <strong>Managing users with an external service</strong> section below.</p>

Read about the Kubernetes approach to authentication in this page of the Kubernetes documentation.

Managing users with charm actions

The recommended method for managing Kubernetes users is with kubernetes-control-plane charm actions.

user-create

Creates a Kubernetes secret with username and optional group information. This action also creates a kubeconfig file that can be retrieved and used to authenticate with the cluster. For example:

juju run-action --wait kubernetes-control-plane/0 user-create name='alice'

Example output:

unit-kubernetes-control-plane-0:
  UnitId: kubernetes-control-plane/0
  id: "2"
  results:
    kubeconfig: juju scp kubernetes-control-plane/0:/home/ubuntu/alice-kubeconfig .
    msg: User "alice" created.
    users: admin, system:kube-controller-manager, system:kube-proxy, system:node:ip-172-31-0-215,
      system:node:ip-172-31-6-184, system:node:ip-172-31-23-177, system:kube-scheduler,
      system:monitoring, alice
  status: completed

If specified, the groups parameter should be a comma-separated list of Kubernetes Groups that this user should belong to. For example:

juju run-action --wait kubernetes-control-plane/0 user-create name='bob' groups='system:masters,devs'

Example output:

unit-kubernetes-control-plane-0:
  UnitId: kubernetes-control-plane/0
  id: "3"
  results:
    kubeconfig: juju scp kubernetes-control-plane/0:/home/ubuntu/bob-kubeconfig .
    msg: User "bob" created.
    users: admin, alice, system:kube-controller-manager, system:kube-proxy, system:node:ip-172-31-0-215,
      system:node:ip-172-31-6-184, system:node:ip-172-31-23-177, system:kube-scheduler,
      system:monitoring, bob
  status: completed

user-list

Lists usernames from all secrets created by Charmed Kubernetes. For example:

juju run-action --wait kubernetes-control-plane/0 user-list

Example output:

unit-kubernetes-control-plane-0:
  UnitId: kubernetes-control-plane/0
  id: "4"
  results:
    users: admin, alice, bob, system:kube-controller-manager, system:kube-proxy, system:node:ip-172-31-0-215,
      system:node:ip-172-31-6-184, system:node:ip-172-31-23-177, system:kube-scheduler,
      system:monitoring
  status: completed

user-delete

Deletes the secret associated with an existing user. For example:

juju run-action --wait kubernetes-control-plane/0 user-delete name=bob

Example output:

unit-kubernetes-control-plane-0:
  UnitId: kubernetes-control-plane/0
  id: "5"
  results:
    msg: User "bob" deleted.
    users: admin, alice, system:kube-controller-manager, system:kube-proxy, system:node:ip-172-31-0-215,
      system:node:ip-172-31-6-184, system:node:ip-172-31-23-177, system:kube-scheduler,
      system:monitoring
  status: completed

Managing users with an external service

The Charmed Kubernetes webhook authenticator will first check local tokens followed by Kubernetes secrets to authenticate a request. When present, the following external services may also be used to process requests:

AWS IAM: IAM credentials can be used for authentication and authorisation on your Charmed Kubernetes cluster, even if the cluster is not hosted on AWS. For further details, see the documentation on AWS IAM with Charmed Kubernetes.
LDAP: See the documentation on using LDAP and Keystone with Charmed Kubernetes.

Additionally, a custom endpoint can be configured to authenticate requests. This must be an https url accessible by the kubernetes-control-plane units. When a JSON-serialized TokenReview object is POSTed to this endpoint, it must respond with appropriate authentication details. Set this option as follows:

juju config kubernetes-control-plane authn-webhook-endpoint='https://your.server:8443/authenticate'

More information about webhook authentication service requirements can be found in the upstream documentation.

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