Key Vault

Azure Key vault

External Secrets Operator integrates with Azure Key vault for secrets, certificates and Keys management.

Authentication

We support Service Principals and Managed Identity authentication.

To use Managed Identity authentication, you should use aad-pod-identity to assign the identity to external-secrets operator. To add the selector to external-secrets operator, use podLabels in your values.yaml in case of Helm installation of external-secrets.

Service Principal key authentication

A service Principal client and Secret is created and the JSON keyfile is stored in a Kind=Secret. The ClientID and ClientSecret should be configured for the secret. This service principal should have proper access rights to the keyvault to be managed by the operator

Managed Identity authentication

A Managed Identity should be created in Azure, and that Identity should have proper rights to the keyvault to be managed by the operator.

If there are multiple Managed Identitites for different keyvaults, the operator should have been assigned all identities via aad-pod-identity, then the SecretStore configuration should include the Id of the idenetity to be used via the identityId field.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: azure-secret-sp
type: Opaque
data:
  ClientID: bXktc2VydmljZS1wcmluY2lwbGUtY2xpZW50LWlkCg==  #service-principal-ID
  ClientSecret: bXktc2VydmljZS1wcmluY2lwbGUtY2xpZW50LXNlY3JldAo= #service-principal-secret

Update secret store

Be sure the azurekv provider is listed in the Kind=SecretStore

apiVersion: external-secrets.io/v1alpha1
kind: SecretStore
metadata:
  name: example-secret-store
spec:
  provider:
    # provider type: azure keyvault
    azurekv:
      # azure tenant ID, see: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/fundamentals/active-directory-how-to-find-tenant
      tenantId: "d3bc2180-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-154105743342"
      # URL of your vault instance, see: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/key-vault/general/about-keys-secrets-certificates
      vaultUrl: "https://my-keyvault-name.vault.azure.net"
      authSecretRef:
        # points to the secret that contains
        # the azure service principal credentials
        clientId:
          name: azure-secret-sp
          key: ClientID
        clientSecret:
          name: azure-secret-sp
          key: ClientSecret

Or in case of Managed Idenetity authentication:

apiVersion: external-secrets.io/v1alpha1
kind: SecretStore
metadata:
  name: example-secret-store
spec:
  provider:
    # provider type: azure keyvault
    azurekv:
      authType: ManagedIdentity
      # Optionally set the Id of the Managed Identity, if multiple identities are assigned to external-secrets operator
      identityId: "<MI_clientId>"
      # URL of your vault instance, see: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/key-vault/general/about-keys-secrets-certificates
      vaultUrl: "https://my-keyvault-name.vault.azure.net"

Object Types

Azure KeyVault manages different object types, we support keys, secrets and certificates. Simply prefix the key with key, secret or cert to retrieve the desired type (defaults to secret).

Object Type	Return Value
secret	the raw secret value.
key	A JWK which contains the public key. Azure KeyVault does not export the private key. You may want to use template functions to transform this JWK into PEM encoded PKIX ASN.1 DER format.
certificate	The raw CER contents of the x509 certificate. You may want to use template functions to transform this into your desired encoding

Creating external secret

To create a kubernetes secret from the Azure Key vault secret a Kind=ExternalSecret is needed.

You can manage keys/secrets/certificates saved inside the keyvault , by setting a "/" prefixed type in the secret name , the default type is a secret. other supported values are cert and key

to select all secrets inside the key vault , you can use the dataFrom directive

apiVersion: external-secrets.io/v1alpha1
kind: ExternalSecret
metadata:
  name: example-external-secret
spec:
  refreshInterval: 1h
  secretStoreRef:
    kind: SecretStore
    name: example-secret-store

  target:
    name: secret-to-be-created
    creationPolicy: Owner

  data:
  # name of the SECRET in the Azure KV (no prefix is by default a SECRET)
  - secretKey: dev-secret-test
    remoteRef:
      key: dev-secret-test

  # explicit type and name of secret in the Azure KV
  - secretKey: dev-another-secret-test
    remoteRef:
      key: secret/dev-secret-test

  # type/name of certificate in the Azure KV
  # raw value will be returned, use templating features for data processing
  - secretKey: dev-cert-test
    remoteRef:
      key: cert/dev-cert-test

  # type/name of the public key in the Azure KV
  # the key is returned PEM encoded
  - secretKey: dev-key-test
    remoteRef:
      key: key/dev-key-test

The operator will fetch the Azure Key vault secret and inject it as a Kind=Secret

kubectl get secret secret-to-be-created -n <namespace> | -o jsonpath='{.data.dev-secret-test}' | base64 -d