Enclaver works by transforming a containerized application into a new container image which runs the underlying application in an enclave.
To demonstrate how this works, let’s run HashiCorp Vault in an enclave. Vault has good security out of the box, but if we trust our attestation, we can cryptographically guarantee that our Vault will only be unsealed in a known trusted state and all material can’t be leaked outside the enclave.
In addition, we will make use of Vault’s auto-unsealing capability using a KMS key to guarantee that only the genuine Vault image running in an enclave can perform the unseal.
In our build step, you will see that some “measurements” are displayed. These are a cryptographic attestation, an identity for the code, that can’t be spoofed or stolen by an attacker. Our key policy will contain some of these values, which prove that only this specific code can access the unseal key.
For this example you’ll need an EC2 instance with support for Nitro Enclaves enabled (c6a.xlarge is the cheapest x86 instance) and Docker installed. See the Deploying on AWS for more details.
After you’ve launched the CloudFormation stack, ssh onto the EC2 instance and clone the following git repo to get the files we’ll be using in this guide:
$ sudo yum install git
$ git clone https://github.com/edgebitio/vault.git
$ cd vault
In this guide, we’ll be using Consul as the storage backend for Vault. Since Vault encrypts all the data prior to storing it in Consul, we don’t have to worry about running Consul in an enclave.
If you don’t have a Consul instance running, it’s easy to start one using Docker. This command will run a Consul cluster of size one and the DATA_DIR environment variable is set to a directory for Consul to store its data.
$ docker run --rm -d --net=host \
--name consul \
-v $DATA_DIR:/consul/data \
consul:1.13 \
agent -server \
-bind 127.0.0.1 \
-client="0.0.0.0" \
-bootstrap-expect 1
We will use Enclaver’s KMS integration to ensure that only Vault running in our enclave can decrypt two secrets:
To get started, create a new symmetric KMS key which we will use to encrypt the two secrets above. Ensure that the IAM role created by CloudFormation can use the key.
Start by going to AWS KMS Console and clicking the “Create Key” button.
Make sure the “Key type” is selected as “Symmetric” and “Key Usage” is set to “Encrypt and decrypt”. Click “Next”.
Enter an alias, e.g. “vault-key” and add a description and tags, if you’d like. Click “Next”.
Select your username as the key administrator and click “Next”.
Select your username and the Enclaver-Demo-DemoIAMRole-XXXX role to define the key usage permisssions. Click “Next”.
Review the configuration and policy and click “Finish”.
Once the key is created, copy the KeyId (it’s a UUID) and set AWS_KEY_ID environment variable to that value.
$ export AWS_KEY_ID=822bd842-ad07-4ca2-b8af-97fcd13fa670
Also configure the region where your key is stored:
$ export AWS_DEFAULT_REGION="us-east-1"
In this guide, we’ll generate a self-signed TLS certificate for Vault to use. If you already use an exisiting certificate, you can skip the generation step and encrypt your existing private key.
The generate-cert.sh script first generates a certificate for the provided hostname, eg vault.local and then encrypts the corresponding private key using the KMS key created above.
$ ./generate-cert.sh "vault.local" $AWS_KEY_ID
The result should be two files: cert.pem and key.pem.enc. Note that localhost and 127.0.0.1 are added to the SAN list in addition to the desired domain name.
We’ll make use of the official Vault Docker image but will layer in the bits to decrypt the TLS private key prior to launch.
The Dockerfile installs the AWS CLI, copies in the certificate and the key files, then installs a new entrypoint which performs the decryption before passing control to the original entrypoint.
$ docker build --build-arg AWS_KEY_ID --build-arg AWS_DEFAULT_REGION -t vault:enclave-src .
At this point vault:enclave-src contains the source image for Enclaver to build into an enclave image.
Enclaver uses a declarative manifest file to define the contents of an enclave. The enclaver.yaml that you cloned looks like this and doesn’t need to be modified:
version: v1
name: "enclaver-vault"
sources:
app: "vault:enclave-src"
target: "vault:enclave"
ingress:
- listen_port: 8200
egress:
allow:
- 169.254.169.254
- kms.*.amazonaws.com
- host
kms_proxy:
listen_port: 9999
defaults:
memory_mb: 3000It specifies that it will use vault:enclave-src that we built in the previous step as its source image.
The resulting Nitro Enclave image (EIF) together with the supporting tooling will be packaged into the vault:enclave target Docker image.
Since Vault has been configured to listen on port 8200 for client connections, we need to specify that in the manifest as well.
Next, we enable egress traffic by configuring a list of allowed addresses.
169.254.169.254 is the well-known IP of the AWS Instance Metadata Service and will be used to acquire the AWS credentials.kms.*.amazonaws.com allows the enclave to talk to KMS in any region.host is a special hostname to refer to the parent EC2 instance and will allow Vault to reach Consul.Enclaver includes a KMS proxy to attach an attestation document to select KMS actions. This allows an application, such as Vault, to take advantage of the attestation features of KMS without modification.
Now, we’ll ask Enclaver to build a new container image using this policy:
$ enclaver build -f enclaver.yaml
Once completed, it will output part of the attestation of the image, which are hashes (“measurements”) that look like:
EIF Info: EIFInfo {
measurements: EIFMeasurements {
pcr0: "bbd4eed4d2e87687ed2c802d49002f42b1ce7a3ee376252415fccf7460267b5ef60da3d651f940b20bd36364d9329a27",
pcr1: "bcdf05fefccaa8e55bf2c8d6dee9e79bbff31e34bf28a99aa19e6b29c37ee80b214a414b7607236edf26fcb78654e63f",
pcr2: "51bf425a88cb47112fd742f6519f8754cce2f94cc37d40f69544efa0528b250168731241033561511eb9b40c1de0003c",
},
}To review, the Enclaver build process did the following:
vault image and injected several Enclaver-specific components:
If you are curious about these components, read about the architecture.
The CloudFormation created a “DemoIAMRole” role that it associated with the EC2 instance and which the enclave will inherit. Our goal is to allow the role to use the KMS key excluding decryption.
The decryption operation will have an additional constraint – restrict decryption to enclaves running a specific image hash.
The pcr0 output during the build contains the desired hash of the enclave image, which will give identity to the enclave running Vault.
Let’s modify the policy to only allow the Vault enclave with the matching hash to decrypt the key.
In the AWS KMS Console select the key and then click the “Switch to policy view” button.
Click the “Edit” button.
Locate the “Allow use of the key” statement and remove the kms:::Decrypt action so the statement looks as follows:
{
"Sid": "Allow use of the key",
"Effect": "Allow",
"Principal": {
"AWS": [
"arn:aws:iam::077296892761:user/eyakubovich",
"arn:aws:iam::077296892761:role/Enclaver-Demo-DemoIAMRole-175IWIYZRKO8F"
]
},
"Action": [
"kms:Encrypt",
"kms:ReEncrypt*",
"kms:GenerateDataKey*",
"kms:DescribeKey"
],
"Resource": "*"
}Add another statement that grants the Decrypt ability soley to the Vault image running inside the enclave:
{
"Sid": "Allow decryption by Vault only",
"Effect": "Allow",
"Principal": {
"AWS": "arn:aws:iam::077296892761:role/Enclaver-Demo-DemoIAMRole-175IWIYZRKO8F"
},
"Action": "kms:Decrypt",
"Resource": "*",
"Condition": {
"StringEqualsIgnoreCase": {
"kms:RecipientAttestation:PCR0": "bbd4eed4d2e87687ed2c802d49002f42b1ce7a3ee376252415fccf7460267b5ef60da3d651f940b20bd36364d9329a27"
}
}
}Be sure to put in the PCR0 value that enclaver build printed at the end.
Finally, click the “Save changes” button.
The result of the build step was a new Docker image named vault:enclave. Running this image starts up Vault in a Nitro Enclave on your AWS machine!
On your EC2 machine, start the enclave with Enclaver:
$ docker run --rm -it \
--net=host \
--privileged \
--name=vault \
--device=/dev/nitro_enclaves \
vault:enclave
It’s normal to see this failure towards the end, because we haven’t initialized Vault yet.
failed to unseal core: error="stored unseal keys are supported, but none were found"
Note: This used the interactive (vs detached) mode to run the container to easily see the logs. Once you’ve confirmed that everything look OK, you can restart the container in the detached (-d) mode.
Before the Vault can be used, it needs to be initialized. You can use the official Docker Vault image to run the CLI command.
Since the Vault client needs to talk TLS with the Vault server, we need to be sure to mount the directory that contains the certificate.
$ docker run --rm -it --net=host \
-v $(pwd):/opt/ \
-e VAULT_ADDR=https://127.0.0.1:8200 \
-e VAULT_CACERT=/opt/cert.pem \
hashicorp/vault:latest operator init
The output will contain the recovery keys and the initial root token. Save the token to the environment variable and create an alias to run Vault commands:
$ export VAULT_TOKEN=hvs.AGVp3Rc9AShUXGf3iJVnM2JP
$ alias vault-cli="docker run --rm -it --net=host -v $(pwd):/opt/ -e VAULT_ADDR=https://127.0.0.1:8200 -e VAULT_CACERT=/opt/cert.pem -e VAULT_TOKEN=$VAULT_TOKEN hashicorp/vault:latest"
Confirm that the vault has been initialized and unsealed:
$ vault-cli status
Key Value
--- -----
Recovery Seal Type shamir
Initialized true
Sealed false
Total Recovery Shares 5
Threshold 3
Version 1.12.0
Build Date 2022-10-10T18:14:33Z
Storage Type consul
Cluster Name vault-cluster-287b7bd6
Cluster ID da4e7a72-4d61-45c2-e2e4-0800265675d0
HA Enabled true
HA Cluster https://127.0.0.1:8201
HA Mode active
Active Since 2022-10-29T16:20:04.604490214Z
You should be able to restart the Vault container now and use the status command to confirm that it starts in the unsealed state.
Let’s use the newly running Vault to store some key/value secrets.
$ vault-cli secrets enable -path=secret/ kv-v2
$ echo 'path "secret/data/*" { capabilities = ["create", "update", "read"] }' > policy.hcl
$ vault-cli policy write my-policy /opt/policy.hcl
$ vault-cli kv put -mount=secret creds username=john password=supersecret
Let’s review what we accomplished. We have an instance of Vault that can automatically unseal itself, but only from our trusted enclave image. It’s impossible to introspect or reconfigure the environment inside the enclave and there is no shell access to our enclave.
This example walked through running an entire application in an enclave. Next, experiement with running a specific microservice or a security-centric function within an enclave.
Check out the example Python + KMS app for a walkthrough.
