Elemental Operator: support hosts without TPM
an invention by fgiudici
Updated almost 2 years ago. 3 hacker ♥️. 1 follower.

Project Description

Currently, the Elemental Operator authenticates the hosts registering for Elemental provisioning via TPM attestation. In particular, the host will perform both Enrollment and Attestation in the same round on the very first registration. Further connections to update the host state will be possible only if the host will be able to proof its identity via TPM (the Enrollment previously done will be used to perform Attestation against the host).

The only available unsupported option to allow nodes without TPM to be provisioned via the Elemental Operator is to use TPM emulation: that would use keys derived by a (random) number to simulate TPM operations and perform attestation (see https://github.com/rancher/elemental-operator/issues/235) .

There are a number of reasons to avoid using random-derived-key TPM emulation in Elemental Operator:

  • security is not comparable to the one of a real TPM device: in particular we just allow to derive all TPM keys from one single number, and anyone with the same number will be able to impersonate the host (see https://github.com/rancher-sandbox/go-tpm/issues/6)
  • in order to allow the host to update its own data (labels) the random number should be derived by a host unique identifier (UID), in order to let the host re-identify itself, making the whole Attestation useless

Viable alternatives include:

  1. plain identification (no authentication): just use a host UID for identification, no authentication. This will allow to skip Attestation, providing almost equal security to the one of the current emulated TPM with key derived by a host UID.
  2. split identification and authentication: identify with some UID from the host and authenticate generating a random key/password, to be stored in the host permanent storage. This could allow a security level between no auth and TPM based Attestation.
  3. fix random generation of the emulated TPM key (https://github.com/rancher-sandbox/go-tpm/issues/6), generate a new truly random TPM simulator and save its state in the host permanent storage before performing Enrollment and Attestation.

Goal for this Hackweek

The overall goal is to review current authentication methods during registration and explore new ones.

The focus for this Hackweek is to extend the Elemental Operator to allow multiple identification/authentication methods: the target MVP is to allow registration via the alternative 1. (identification and no authentication).

Resources

add-emoji Elemental Operator repo

add-emoji Discussion on TPM alternatives

Looking for hackers with the skills:

golang

This project is part of:

Hack Week 22

Activity

  • almost 2 years ago: flonnegren liked this project.
  • almost 2 years ago: paulgonin liked this project.
  • almost 2 years ago: ademicev0 liked this project.
  • almost 2 years ago: fgiudici removed keyword tpm from this project.
  • almost 2 years ago: fgiudici added keyword "golang" to this project.
  • almost 2 years ago: fgiudici added keyword "tpm" to this project.
  • almost 2 years ago: fgiudici started this project.
  • almost 2 years ago: fgiudici originated this project.


    • Comments

    • fgiudici
      almost 2 years ago by fgiudici | Reply

      Feb 3, end of the hackweek:

      We have a PR introducing a plain identification way to "authenticate" against the elemental-operator, as described at point 1. above.

      Instead of a UUID, since we have got report that SMBIOS information can be empty on some hw vendors, we used the MAC address of the "main" network interface as the unique identifier to use during registration (that should really be unique... otherwise, well, you will have bigger issues than registering add-emoji )

      The "main" network interface is actually the first network interface found in the system with a hw address and an IP address assigned there. Good enough for this PoC, since we expect the ifindex net interface to be lower for phisical nics, so they should be checked before any virtual interface.

      Some value in the work was to generalize the authentication code, especially on the client side (using Golang interfaces).

      Talk is cheap. Show me the code.

      here it is: https://github.com/rancher/elemental-operator/pull/345

    • zetisno
      2 months ago by zetisno | Reply

      thank

    Similar Projects

    terraform-provider-feilong by e_bischoff

    Project Description

    People need to test operating systems and applications on s390 platform.

    Installation from scratch solutions include:

    • just deploy and provision manually add-emoji (with the help of ftpboot script, if you are at SUSE)
    • use s3270 terminal emulation (used by openQA people?)
    • use LXC from IBM to start CP commands and analyze the results
    • use zPXE to do some PXE-alike booting (used by the orthos team?)
    • use tessia to install from scratch using autoyast
    • use libvirt for s390 to do some nested virtualization on some already deployed z/VM system
    • directly install a Linux kernel on a LPAR and use kvm + libvirt from there

    Deployment from image solutions include:

    • use ICIC web interface (openstack in disguise, contributed by IBM)
    • use ICIC from the openstack terraform provider (used by Rancher QA)
    • use zvm_ansible to control SMAPI
    • connect directly to SMAPI low-level socket interface

    IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center (ICIC) harnesses the Feilong API, but you can use Feilong without installing ICIC, provided you set up a "z/VM cloud connector" into one of your VMs following this schema.

    What about writing a terraform Feilong provider, just like we have the terraform libvirt provider? That would allow to transparently call Feilong from your main.tf files to deploy and destroy resources on your system/z.

    Other Feilong-based solutions include:

    • make libvirt Feilong-aware
    • simply call Feilong from shell scripts with curl
    • use zvmconnector client python library from Feilong
    • use zthin part of Feilong to directly command SMAPI.

    Goal for Hackweek 23

    My final goal is to be able to easily deploy and provision VMs automatically on a z/VM system, in a way that people might enjoy even outside of SUSE.

    My technical preference is to write a terraform provider plugin, as it is the approach that involves the least software components for our deployments, while remaining clean, and compatible with our existing development infrastructure.

    Goals for Hackweek 24

    Feilong provider works and is used internally by SUSE Manager team. Let's push it forward!

    Let's add support for fiberchannel disks and multipath.

    Goals for Hackweek 25

    • Finish support for fiberchannel disks and multipath
    • Fix problems with registration on hashicorp providers registry

    OpenQA Golang api client by hilchev

    Description

    I would like to make a simple cli tool to communicate with the OpenQA API

    Goals

    • OpenQA has a ton of information that is hard to get via the UI. A tool like this would make my life easier :)
    • Would potentially make it easier in the future to make UI changes without Perl.
    • Improve my Golang skills

    Resources

    • https://go.dev/doc/
    • https://openqa.opensuse.org/api

    iSCSI integration in Warewulf by ncuralli

    Description

    This Hackweek project aims to enhance Warewulf’s capabilities by adding iSCSI support, enabling both remote boot and flexible mounting of iSCSI devices within the filesystem. The project, which already handles NFS, DHCP, and iPXE, will be extended to offer iSCSI services as well, centralizing all necessary services for provisioning and booting cluster nodes.

    Goals

    • iSCSI Boot Option: Enable nodes to boot directly from iSCSI volumes
    • Mounting iSCSI Volumes within the Filesystem: Implement support for mounting iSCSI devices at various points within the filesystem

    Resources

    https://warewulf.org/

    Steps

    • add generic framework to handle remote ressource/filesystems to wwctl [ ]
    • add iSCSI handling to wwctl configure [ ]
    • add iSCSI to dracut files [ ]
    • test it [ ]

    Dartboard TUI by IValentin

    Description

    Our scalability and performance testing swiss-army knife tool Dartboard is a major WIP so why not add more scope creep? Dartboard is a cli tool which enables users to:

    • Define a "Dart" config file as YAML which defines the various components to be created/setup when Dartboard runs its commands
    • Spin up infrastructure utilizing opentofu/terraform providers
    • Setup K3s or RKE2 clusters on the newly created infrastructure
    • Deploy Rancher (with or without downstream cluster), rancher-monitoring (Grafana + Prometheus)
    • Create resources in-bulk within the newly created Rancher cluster (ConfigMaps, Secrets, Users, Roles, etc.)
    • Run various performance and scalability tests via k6
    • Export/Import various tracked metrics (WIP)

    Given all these features (and the features to come), it can be difficult to onboard and transfer knowledge of the tool. With a TUI, Dartboard's usage complexity can be greatly reduced!

    Goals

    • Create a TUI for Dartboard's "subcommands"
    • Gain more familiarity with Dartboard and create a more user-friendly interface to enable others to use it
    • Stretch Create a TUI workflow for generating a Dart file

    Resources

    https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea

    A CLI for Harvester by mohamed.belgaied

    [comment]: # Harvester does not officially come with a CLI tool, the user is supposed to interact with Harvester mostly through the UI [comment]: # Though it is theoretically possible to use kubectl to interact with Harvester, the manipulation of Kubevirt YAML objects is absolutely not user friendly. [comment]: # Inspired by tools like multipass from Canonical to easily and rapidly create one of multiple VMs, I began the development of Harvester CLI. Currently, it works but Harvester CLI needs some love to be up-to-date with Harvester v1.0.2 and needs some bug fixes and improvements as well.

    Project Description

    Harvester CLI is a command line interface tool written in Go, designed to simplify interfacing with a Harvester cluster as a user. It is especially useful for testing purposes as you can easily and rapidly create VMs in Harvester by providing a simple command such as: harvester vm create my-vm --count 5 to create 5 VMs named my-vm-01 to my-vm-05.

    asciicast

    Harvester CLI is functional but needs a number of improvements: up-to-date functionality with Harvester v1.0.2 (some minor issues right now), modifying the default behaviour to create an opensuse VM instead of an ubuntu VM, solve some bugs, etc.

    Github Repo for Harvester CLI: https://github.com/belgaied2/harvester-cli

    Done in previous Hackweeks

    • Create a Github actions pipeline to automatically integrate Harvester CLI to Homebrew repositories: DONE
    • Automatically package Harvester CLI for OpenSUSE / Redhat RPMs or DEBs: DONE

    Goal for this Hackweek

    The goal for this Hackweek is to bring Harvester CLI up-to-speed with latest Harvester versions (v1.3.X and v1.4.X), and improve the code quality as well as implement some simple features and bug fixes.

    Some nice additions might be: * Improve handling of namespaced objects * Add features, such as network management or Load Balancer creation ? * Add more unit tests and, why not, e2e tests * Improve CI * Improve the overall code quality * Test the program and create issues for it

    Issue list is here: https://github.com/belgaied2/harvester-cli/issues

    Resources

    The project is written in Go, and using client-go the Kubernetes Go Client libraries to communicate with the Harvester API (which is Kubernetes in fact). Welcome contributions are:

    • Testing it and creating issues
    • Documentation
    • Go code improvement

    What you might learn

    Harvester CLI might be interesting to you if you want to learn more about:

    • GitHub Actions
    • Harvester as a SUSE Product
    • Go programming language
    • Kubernetes API