Secrets
When creating custom pipelines you might have settings that you don't want to store in plain text or share with other users of the pipeline. Prevent this by using secrets in Chronosphere Telemetry Pipeline.
Due to Kubernetes ConfigMap (opens in a new tab) storage limitations, the total size of a pipeline and its associated resources can't exceed 1 MiB. This limit includes the combined size of configuration files, secrets, parsers, and any other files.
Secret storage
Telemetry Pipeline encrypts all stored secrets using RSA public key cryptography.
For every Core Instance you create, Telemetry Pipeline generates a public key and a private key. Chronosphere stores the public key in the Telemetry Pipeline backend, and the private key is stored solely in your local environment.
If you add a secret to a Core Instance or any of its pipelines, Chronosphere encrypts that secret with the Core Instance's public key, then stores the encrypted version in the Telemetry Pipeline backend. When your Core Instance fetches information from the Telemetry Pipeline backend, it uses its private key to decrypt any encrypted secrets. Decrypted secrets are then stored within that Core Instance as Kubernetes Secrets (opens in a new tab), which take the form of plain text.
Chronosphere does not store private keys or unencrypted secrets in the Telemetry Pipeline backend. If you delete or modify the private key for a Core Instance, any attempts to decrypt secrets will fail due to incompatibility with the associated public key.
As a protective measure, Chronosphere recommends backing up your private key in case you need to restore it later.
The following diagrams illustrate the secret generation and usage.
Encryption
Decryption
Add a secret
You can add a secret to an individual pipeline or to a Core Instance. Adding a secret to a Core Instance makes that secret available to all pipelines within the Core Instance.
Pipelines
Use one of the following methods to add a secret to a pipeline:
- Sign in to Telemetry Pipeline (opens in a new tab).
- Open the project that contains the pipeline that you want to add a secret to.
- Go to Core Instances, then click the name of the Core Instance where you deployed the pipeline that you want to add a secret to.
- Under Data Pipelines, click the name of the pipeline that you want to add a secret to.
- Click Advanced Settings.
- In the Add new secret section, enter values for the Name and Value fields.
- Click Add secret to save the secret.
Core Instance
Use one of the following methods to add a secret to a Core Instance:
- Sign in to Telemetry Pipeline (opens in a new tab).
- Open the project that contains the Core Instance that you want to add a secret to.
- Go to Core Instances, then click the name of the Core Instance that you want to add a secret to.
- Click Advanced Settings.
- In the Add new secret section, enter values the Name and Value fields.
- Click Add secret to save the secret.
Any secrets you add are visible in the Older Secrets table.
Update a secret
You can replace the value of an existing secret with an updated value.
Before you update a secret, you won't be able to see its current value. Similarly, after you update a secret, you won't be able to see any of its previous values.
Pipelines
Use one of the following methods to update a secret for a pipeline:
- Sign in to Telemetry Pipeline (opens in a new tab).
- Open the project that contains the pipeline whose secret you want to update.
- Go to Core Instances, then click the name of the Core Instance that contains the pipeline whose secret you want to update.
- Under Data Pipelines, click the name of the pipeline whose secret you want to update.
- Click Advanced Settings.
- In the Older Secrets table, find the secret that you want to update, then click Update.
- Enter a new value in the Secret value field, then click Save changes.
Core Instance
Use one of the following methods to update a secret for a Core Instance:
- Sign in to Telemetry Pipeline (opens in a new tab).
- Open the project that contains the Core Instance whose secret you want to update.
- Go to Core Instances, then click the name of the Core Instance whose secret you want to update.
- Click Advanced Settings.
- In the Older Secrets table, find the secret that you want to update, then click Update.
- Enter a new value in the Secret value field, then click Save changes.
The secret's name and date it was added display in the Older Secrets table.
Reference a secret
Secrets can be used as references by Pipeline CLI and Kubernetes.
Pipeline CLI
Secrets in Telemetry Pipeline are stored per pipeline and referenced in configuration paths by using brackets. For example, a secret that looks like the following:
key=value
can be referenced in a configuration as {{ secrets.key }}
. This syntax must
include a space between each set of brackets and the text inside them.
To reference secrets in Pipeline CLI, create a new file in your local environment and
then add it to your configuration. For example, in the pipeline-es.yaml
file, don't
specify HTTP_Passwd
in plain text. Instead, use a secret with the variable
es_http_passwd
.
pipeline:
inputs:
- Name: forward
listen: 0.0.0.0
port: "24284"
outputs:
- Name: es
host: hostname.us-east-2.es.amazonaws.com
port: "443"
index: calyptia-core
type: _doc
http_user: es
http_passwd: {{ secrets.es_http_passwd }}
Match_Regex: .{0,}
Define the es_http_passwd
variable in the secrets.env
file:
es_http_passwd=123123
Kubernetes Secrets
If you deployed Telemetry Pipeline in a Kubernetes cluster, you can reference existing Kubernetes Secrets (opens in a new tab) in that cluster without adding any new Secrets to Telemetry Pipeline directly.
To reference a Kubernetes Secret inside a pipeline configuration file, use the following syntax:
${SECRET_NAME_PARAMETER}
Replace the following:
NAME
: The name of your Kubernetes Secret.PARAMETER
: The name of a key stored within thedata
field of your Kubernetes Secret.
To prevent errors, be sure to remove any hyphens (-
) from the name of your
Kubernetes Secret before referencing it in Telemetry Pipeline, because NAME
can't
contain a hyphen.
For example, for the following Kubernetes Secret named test
:
apiVersion: v1
data:
SPECIALSAUCE: ZHVtbXk=
kind: Secret
metadata:
creationTimestamp: 2024-05-30T21:53:05Z
labels:
app.kubernetes.io/component: calyptia-core
core-pipeline: default.213-test-k8s-secrets
name: test
namespace: default
resourceVersion: "220374"
uid: 8b5f0c7e-0826-4c0b-90be-8bce36f026b3
type: Opaque
You can reference the value of SPECIALSAUCE
in a pipeline configuration file
through ${SECRET_TEST_SPECIALSAUCE}
:
pipeline:
inputs:
- dummy: {"message": "dummy"}
rate: "1"
samples: "0"
start_time_sec: "-1"
start_time_nsec: "-1"
Name: ${SECRET_TEST_SPECIALSAUCE}
From your pipeline's perspective, the Name
key has a value of ZHVtbXk=
.
Back up and restore a private key
To prevent issues with secret storage and decryption, you can back up the private keys stored within each Core Instance, then restore these keys later if needed.
Back up a private key
To back up the private key for a Core Instance:
-
Run the following kubectl command:
kubectl get secret "calyptia-INSTANCE-ENV-secret" -o jsonpath='{.data.private-key}' | base64 --decode
Replace the following values:
INSTANCE
: The name of the Core Instance whose key you want to back up.ENV
: The environment associated with your Core Instance. If you're not sure what value to use here, your environment is likelydefault
.
-
In the resulting output, look for the text that contains your private key:
-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY----- ... -----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
Your private key is the value between
BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY
andEND RSA PRIVATE KEY
. -
Copy the value of your private key and save it in a trusted, secure location, like a password manager or cloud secret storage service.
If you have multiple Core Instances, repeat these steps for each Core Instance whose private key you want to back up.
Restore a private key
To restore a private key that you previously backed up:
-
In kubectl, run the following command to encode your key:
ENCODED_PRIVATE_KEY=$(echo '-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY----- VALUE -----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----' | base64)
Replace
VALUE
with the value of your private key. -
Run the following command to delete any previously encoded secrets, which might be inaccurate due to an incorrect or deleted private key:
kubectl delete secret calyptia-INSTANCE-ENV-secret -n NAMESPACE
Replace the following values:
INSTANCE
: The name of the Core Instance whose key you want to restore.ENV
: The environment associated with your Core Instance. If you're not sure what value to use here, your environment is likelydefault
.NAMESPACE
: The namespace where you deployed your Core Instance. If you're not sure what value to use here, your namespace is likelycalyptia
.
-
Run the following command to recreate your secrets using the restored private key:
echo "apiVersion: v1 kind: Secret metadata: labels: app.kubernetes.io/created-by: core-operator app.kubernetes.io/managed-by: core-operator app.kubernetes.io/part-of: calyptia calyptia.core: core-operator name: calyptia-INSTANCE-ENV-secret type: Opaque data: private-key: $ENCODED_PRIVATE_KEY" | kubectl apply -f -
Replace the following values:
INSTANCE
: The name of the Core Instance whose key you want to restore.ENV
: The environment associated with your Core Instance. If you're not sure what value to use here, your environment is likelydefault
.