Table of Contents

1. Overview
   • What certs affects
2. Reference - An under-the-hood peek at what the module is doing and how
3. Development - Guide for contributing to the module

Overview

This module is responsible for generating a CA and certificate used for communication between services inside the Katello deployment.

What certs affects

• Installs and deploys a CA
• Deploys certificates generated from the CA

Reference

• default CA - a CA generated by the installer used by the installer
• server CA - CA used for issuing the server certificates and it's used to verify the server identity; when not specified otherwise, the default CA is used
• puppet CA - a CA controlled by Puppet for Puppet Agents authentication (not covered by this module)

Certificates overview

cert	purpose	CA
${hostname}-apache	a server certificate for Apache https	server
${hostname}-foreman-proxy	a server certificate for Foreman-proxy https	server
${hostname}-foreman-client	a client certificate for Foreman -> Foreman-proxy communication	default
${hostname}-puppet-client	a client certificate for Puppet ENC -> Foreman communication	default

Phases

The certificates are configured in three phases:

1. generation - producing a certificate; in this phase, the $generate parameter of the cert resources is set to true
2. deployment - installing a certificate into a system that will use it; in this phase, a $deploy parameter of the cert resources is set to true; this allows to generate the certificates on one machine while deploying on another
3. configuration - placing a files with keys to specific locations where the services will be configured to read them from, using the pubkey, privkey and key_bundle types, the certs need to be generated and deployed on given system before being able to use it

Types and providers

There is a set of custom Puppet types defined for defining the cert-specific resources:

• ca - represents an authority that can be used for issuing certificates
• cert - represents a certificate, the CA of the certs is specified by a ca property, where the keys are stored should be might be implementation specific and pubkey and privkey should be used for using the cert keys
• pubkey - a file to copy a public key of a cert to. It produces event on subscribed resources when a certificate changes (useful for restarting a service when the certificate changes)
• privkey - a file to copy a private key of a cert to. It produces event on subscribed resources when a certificate changes (useful for restarting a service when the certificate changes)
• key_bundle - a file to copy both public and private key of a cert.

For now, the only implemented provider of the type is katello_ssl_tool. It works as follow:

1. generation - the artefact of this phase is an RPM with the keys for the certificate; the RPMs, as well as other files generated in the process, are located in /root/ssl-build directory

2. deployment - installing the RPMs into the system; the certificates are located in /etc/pki/katello-certs-tools/ directory

Development

See the CONTRIBUTING guide for steps on how to make a change and get it accepted upstream.