oxidecomputer / oxidecomputer/omicron
tls: certificate management flow could avoid accepting private key
Nobody has claimed this yet.
- Dominant language
- Rust
- Stars
- 572
- Forks
- 97
- Avg merge
- 2d 12h
- Merged PRs (30d)
- 96
Description
The current management flow for TLS certificates for the external API is that people upload a private key and certificate chain, both in PEM format. As @kc8apf pointed out in chat, this is problematic. Modern security best practice is that private keys never leave the device they're generated on because doing so risks leaking the keys in transit. It's unclear how big this risk is for us. But by accepting the private key unencrypted, that means the customer must store the private key unencrypted (at least briefly) in order to send it to us, which also isn't great.
I'm not sure if fixing this is an MVP-blocker. However, this is an area of the API that customers are likely to want to automate so they can automate certificate renewal. So changing this after shipping might be particularly annoying for customers.
See also #2367 -- it may be worth doing this at the same time as that.
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start by reviewing the external API's TLS certificate management flow and the related discussion in issue #2367. The issue does not name implementation files or tests; first clarify the certificate-renewal design and define what secure key handling should replace the current PEM private-key upload before implementation.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- rust
- Domain
- api, security
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 5/5
- Estimated time
- Over a week
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Needs clarification
- Newbie friendliness
- 25/100