coreos / coreos/ignition

TLS client certificates and two-step config fetch for confidential clusters

Open
#1,870 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Dominant language
Go
Stars
974
Forks
296
Avg merge
6d 14h
Merged PRs (30d)
9

Description

Feature Request

Environment

Confidential Clusters.

Desired Feature

For confidential cluster use cases, we want to deliver the full Ignition config only to nodes that passed attestation against a specific attestation server.

The design would look like the following:

  1. Get the config from the cloud metadata
  • It contains no secret values
  • It includes a new config entry that points to the attestation server (KBS?) to use for attestation
  • It includes a merge/replace config that needs mutual TLS to be fetched
  1. Ignition would call out to the attestation agent (KBS client?) to perform the attestation.
  2. The attestation client will get back a TLS client certificate.
  3. Ignition would then use this client certificate to fetch the full config and resume configuration/booting.

Other Information

N/A

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

No files, tests, or entry points are named. Start by mapping Ignition's cloud-metadata fetch, merge/replace configuration handling, and the attestation-client integration described here. Done would require an agreed design and implementation for attestation, TLS client-certificate retrieval, authenticated full-config fetching, and resumed boot configuration.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
go
Domain
security
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.