oxidecomputer / oxidecomputer/omicron

tls: certificate management flow could avoid accepting private key

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security
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

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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

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

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