Get started using secrets
Secrets are stored in AWS Secrets Manager. You will need to be on-boarded to GovWifi’s AWS Staging and Production accounts in order to access these secrets.
Secrets Manager
Once you have access to the AWS console, navigate to the Secrets Manager service in AWS.
The relevant credentials are listed in the following format: <service>/<item>.
Previous credential configuration
Historically, secrets were stored in govwifi-build and were encrypted using GPG.
We maintain this documentation for some remaining sensitive data which aren’t critical to our Terraform or applications.
All shell commands assume you are running from within the govwifi-terraform
repository since the govwifi-build repository is cloned in the
.private directory of govwifi-terraform.
Tools
To use these secrets, you will need the Password Store tool installed on your machine.
You will also need an implementation of gpg installed. This will be installable under the name gnupg:
apt/brew/dnf/rpm/yum install gnupg
Getting access
Once you have installed the tools, you will need someone to re-encrypt the secrets with your public key.
Give someone your full key ID:
gpg --list-keys '<name>@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk'
An example of a key ID is: 06D20CF70AC370DE72F49EDC992939FDD5C5144C
Please also ensure your public key is on a well known keyserver:
We suggest keyserver.ubuntu.com as they are known to be reliable.
gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --send-keys '<your key ID>'
Giving Access
The new joiner must first send their GPG key ID to a current member of the team.
Once the key is received, all team members must use the receive-keys option to accept it and provide the key with ultimate trust:
key_id='<their key ID>'
gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --receive-keys "$key_id"
echo "${key_id}:6" | gpg --import-ownertrust
To on-board the new GPG key, navigate to the .private directory in the govwifi-terraform project.
Checkout a new branch in .private:
$ git checkout -b onboarding_<NAME>_GPG_key
Append the new key to the .private/passwords/.gpg-id file:
echo "$key_id" >> '.private/passwords/.gpg-id'
Change directory to the root project (govwifi-terraform/), then re-encrypt the passwords from within the govwifi-terraform repo:
make rencrypt-passwords
Note: make commands can only be run from the root project directory.
There can be a number of reason for this to fail, for example one of the keys could have expired, if that’s the case, contact the owner of the key and ask them to extned their expiration date and reupload their key to the server.
To extend key expiry
“sh
$ gpg --list-keys
$ gpg --edit-key KEYID
expire 2y y trust 5 save <– Very important! ”` then upload the key again.
Once the secrets have been re-encrypted, use git to add, commit and push the changes in the .private directory.
Raise a PR in the govwifi-build repo on Github. Ask another team member to test the encryption has worked by checking out the PR branch and testing they can decrypt the files using gpg -d.
New members
New members must import all the existing gpg keys that are stored.
To do this read in all the keys in passwords/.gpg-id and import them:
$ gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --receive-keys <key_id> && gpg --import-ownertrust
If you are a new starter you’ll have to do this for every team members key, so to speed things up, ‘cat’ out the keys and use the output in the receive-keys command. “`sh
get all the keys
cat .gpg-id | tr ‘\n’ ‘ ’
paste the output to.
gpg –keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com –receive-keys
Getting a secret
Throughout the documentation there will be references to specific secrets stored within the password store.
To read individual secrets, run the command:
PASSWORD_STORE_DIR=<password_store_dir> pass show <secret_name>
where:
<password_store_dir>is the path of thepasswordsdirectory of the govwifi-build repository on your local machine.<secret_name>is the path of the secret that you want to display. You can omit this to get a list of all secret paths.
For example, if you want to access the Staging Bastion SSH Key:
PASSWORD_STORE_DIR=.private/passwords pass show keys/govwifi-staging-bastion-key
Adding/Editing a secret
Use pass to edit your file for ease - you can be anywhere when you do this - the
PASSWORD_STORE_DIR=<password_store_dir> pass edit <secret_name>
Example:
PASSWORD_STORE_DIR=~/govwifi-build/passwords pass edit your_secret.txt
Make your changes and save them. They will be re-encrypted automatically if all your gpg keys are up to date.