Secure Bootstrap

This guide presumes that you already have CFEngine properly installed and running on the policy hub, the machine that distributes the policy to all the clients. It also presumes that CFEngine is installed, but not yet configured, on a number of clients.

We present a step-by-step procedure to securely bootstrapping a number of servers (referred to as clients) to the policy hub, over a possibly unsafe network.

Introduction

CFEngine's trust model is based on the secure exchange of keys. This exchange of keys between client and hub, can either happen manually or automatically. Usually this step is automated as a dead-simple "bootstrap" procedure:

cf-agent --bootstrap $HUB_IP

It is presumed that during this first key exchange, the network is trusted, and no attacker will hijack the connection. After "bootstrapping" is complete, the node can be deployed in the open internet, and all connections are considered secure.

However there are cases where initial CFEngine deployment is happening over an insecure network, for example the Internet. In such cases we already have a secure channel to the clients, usually ssh, and we use this channel to manually establish trust from the hub to the clients and vice-versa.

Locking down the policy server

We must change the policy we're distributing to fully locked-down settings. So after we have set-up our hub (using the standard procedure of cf-agent --bootstrap $HUB_IP) we take care of the following:

• cf-serverd must never accept a connection from a client presenting an untrusted key. Disable automatic key trust by providing an empty list for def.trustkeyfrom.

Bootstrap without automatically trusting

In order to securely bootstrap a host you must have the public key of the host you wish to trust.

Copy the hubs public key (/var/cfengine/ppkeys/localhost.pub) to the agent you wish to bootstrap. And install it using cf-key.

[root@host001]# cf-key --trust-key /path/to/hubs/key.pub

Note: If you are using protocol_version 1 or classic you need to supply an IP address before the path to the key.

For example:

  notice: Establishing trust might be incomplete. For completeness, use --trust-key IPADDR:filename

Next copy the hosts public key (/var/cfengine/ppkeys/localhost.pub) to the hub and install it using cf-key.

[root@hub]# cf-key --trust-key /path/to/host001/key.pub

Now that the hosts trust each other we can bootstrap the host to the hub.

[root@host001]# cf-agent --trust-server no --bootstrap $HUB 

Manually establishing trust

Get the hub's key and fingerprint, we'll them when configuring the host to trust the hub:

[root@hub]# HUB_KEY=`cf-key -p /var/cfengine/ppkeys/localhost.pub

On each client we deploy

We will perform a manual bootstrap.

• Get the client's key and fingerprint, we'll need it later when establishing trust on the hub:

  [root@host001]# CLIENT_KEY=`cf-key -p /var/cfengine/ppkeys/localhost.pub`
  

• Write the policy hub's IP address to policy_server.dat:

  [root@host001]# echo $HUB_IP > /var/cfengine/policy_server.dat
  

• Put the hub's key into the client's trusted keys:

  [root@host001]# scp $HUB_IP:/var/cfengine/ppkeys/localhost.pub /var/cfengine/ppkeys/root-${HUB_KEY}.pub
  

Install the clients public key on the hub

• Put the client's key into the hub's trusted keys. So on the hub, run:

  [root@hub]# scp $CLIENT_IP:/var/cfengine/ppkeys/localhost.pub /var/cfengine/ppkeys/root-${CLIENT_KEY}.pub