Roles are named and can express the same bundle of permissions that can
currently be assigned to a Token (lists of Policies and Service
Identities). The difference with a Role is that it not itself a bearer
token, but just another entity that can be tied to a Token.
This lets an operator potentially curate a set of smaller reusable
Policies and compose them together into reusable Roles, rather than
always exploding that same list of Policies on any Token that needs
similar permissions.
This also refactors the acl replication code to be semi-generic to avoid
3x copypasta.
This PR adds two features which will be useful for operators when ACLs are in use.
1. Tokens set in configuration files are now reloadable.
2. If `acl.enable_token_persistence` is set to `true` in the configuration, tokens set via the `v1/agent/token` endpoint are now persisted to disk and loaded when the agent starts (or during configuration reload)
Note that token persistence is opt-in so our users who do not want tokens on the local disk will see no change.
Some other secondary changes:
* Refactored a bunch of places where the replication token is retrieved from the token store. This token isn't just for replicating ACLs and now it is named accordingly.
* Allowed better paths in the `v1/agent/token/` API. Instead of paths like: `v1/agent/token/acl_replication_token` the path can now be just `v1/agent/token/replication`. The old paths remain to be valid.
* Added a couple new API functions to set tokens via the new paths. Deprecated the old ones and pointed to the new names. The names are also generally better and don't imply that what you are setting is for ACLs but rather are setting ACL tokens. There is a minor semantic difference there especially for the replication token as again, its no longer used only for ACL token/policy replication. The new functions will detect 404s and fallback to using the older token paths when talking to pre-1.4.3 agents.
* Docs updated to reflect the API additions and to show using the new endpoints.
* Updated the ACL CLI set-agent-tokens command to use the non-deprecated APIs.
* Add leader token upgrade test and fix various ACL enablement bugs
* Update the leader ACL initialization tests.
* Add a StateStore ACL tests for ACLTokenSet and ACLTokenGetBy* functions
* Advertise the agents acl support status with the agent/self endpoint.
* Make batch token upsert CAS’able to prevent consistency issues with token auto-upgrade
* Finish up the ACL state store token tests
* Finish the ACL state store unit tests
Also rename some things to make them more consistent.
* Do as much ACL replication testing as I can.
This PR is almost a complete rewrite of the ACL system within Consul. It brings the features more in line with other HashiCorp products. Obviously there is quite a bit left to do here but most of it is related docs, testing and finishing the last few commands in the CLI. I will update the PR description and check off the todos as I finish them over the next few days/week.
Description
At a high level this PR is mainly to split ACL tokens from Policies and to split the concepts of Authorization from Identities. A lot of this PR is mostly just to support CRUD operations on ACLTokens and ACLPolicies. These in and of themselves are not particularly interesting. The bigger conceptual changes are in how tokens get resolved, how backwards compatibility is handled and the separation of policy from identity which could lead the way to allowing for alternative identity providers.
On the surface and with a new cluster the ACL system will look very similar to that of Nomads. Both have tokens and policies. Both have local tokens. The ACL management APIs for both are very similar. I even ripped off Nomad's ACL bootstrap resetting procedure. There are a few key differences though.
Nomad requires token and policy replication where Consul only requires policy replication with token replication being opt-in. In Consul local tokens only work with token replication being enabled though.
All policies in Nomad are globally applicable. In Consul all policies are stored and replicated globally but can be scoped to a subset of the datacenters. This allows for more granular access management.
Unlike Nomad, Consul has legacy baggage in the form of the original ACL system. The ramifications of this are:
A server running the new system must still support other clients using the legacy system.
A client running the new system must be able to use the legacy RPCs when the servers in its datacenter are running the legacy system.
The primary ACL DC's servers running in legacy mode needs to be a gate that keeps everything else in the entire multi-DC cluster running in legacy mode.
So not only does this PR implement the new ACL system but has a legacy mode built in for when the cluster isn't ready for new ACLs. Also detecting that new ACLs can be used is automatic and requires no configuration on the part of administrators. This process is detailed more in the "Transitioning from Legacy to New ACL Mode" section below.
R.B. Boyer