open-consul/agent/connect
Mitchell Hashimoto 5452c32f50 CA Provider Plugins (#4751)
This adds the `agent/connect/ca/plugin` library for consuming/serving Connect CA providers as [go-plugin](https://github.com/hashicorp/go-plugin) plugins. This **does not** wire this up in any way to Consul itself, so this will not enable using these plugins yet. 

## Why?

We want to enable CA providers to be pluggable without modifying Consul so that any CA or PKI system can potentially back the Connect certificates. This CA system may also be used in the future for easier bootstrapping and internal cluster security.

### go-plugin

The benefit of `go-plugin` is that for the plugin consumer, the fact that the interface implementation is communicating over multi-process RPC is invisible. Internals of Consul will continue to just use `ca.Provider` interface implementations as if they're local. For plugin _authors_, they simply have to implement the interface. The network/transport/process management issues are handled by go-plugin itself.

The CA provider plugins support both `net/rpc` and gRPC transports. This enables easy authoring in any language. go-plugin handles the actual protocol handshake and connection. This is just a feature of go-plugin. 

`go-plugin` is already in production use for years by Packer, Terraform, Nomad, Vault, and Sentinel. We've shown stability for both desktop and server-side software. It is very mature.

## Implementation Details

### `map[string]interface{}`

The `Configure` method passes a `map[string]interface{}`. This map contains only Go primitives and containers of primitives (no funcs, chans, etc.). For `net/rpc` we encode as-is using Gob. For gRPC we marshal to JSON and transmit as a `bytes` type. This is the same approach we take with Vault and other software.

Note that this is just the transport protocol, the end software views it fully decoded.

### `x509.Certificate` and `CertificateRequest`

We transmit the raw ASN.1  bytes and decode on the other side. Unit tests are verifying we get the same cert/csrs across the wire.

### Testing

`go-plugin` exposes test helpers that enable testing the full plugin RPC over real loopback network connections. We test all endpoints for success and error for both `net/rpc` and gRPC.

### Vendoring

This PR doesn't introduce vendoring for two reasons:

  1. @banks's `f-envoy` branch introduces a lot of these and I didn't want conflict.
  2. The library isn't actually used yet so it doesn't introduce compile-time errors (it does introduce test errors).

## Next Steps

With this in place, we need to figure out the proper way to actually hook these up to Consul, load them, etc. This discussion can happen elsewhere, since regardless of approach this plugin library implementation is the exact same.
2019-01-07 12:48:44 -05:00
..
ca CA Provider Plugins (#4751) 2019-01-07 12:48:44 -05:00
csr.go connect/ca: tighten up the intermediate signing verification 2018-09-14 16:08:54 -07:00
generate.go Fix logical conflicts with CA refactor 2018-06-14 09:42:17 -07:00
parsing.go connect/ca: update Consul provider to use new cross-sign CSR method 2018-06-25 12:25:41 -07:00
testing_ca.go agent: fix formatting 2018-11-07 02:16:03 -08:00
testing_ca_test.go connect.Service based implementation after review feedback. 2018-06-14 09:41:56 -07:00
testing_spiffe.go Fixed many tests after rebase. Some still failing and seem unrelated to any connect changes. 2018-06-14 09:42:16 -07:00
uri.go xDS Server Implementation (#4731) 2018-10-10 16:55:34 +01:00
uri_service.go agent/connect: Authorize for CertURI 2018-06-14 09:41:54 -07:00
uri_service_test.go agent/connect: Authorize for CertURI 2018-06-14 09:41:54 -07:00
uri_signing.go connect/ca: add intermediate functions to Consul CA provider 2018-09-13 13:09:21 -07:00
uri_signing_test.go Fixed many tests after rebase. Some still failing and seem unrelated to any connect changes. 2018-06-14 09:42:16 -07:00
uri_test.go xDS Server Implementation (#4731) 2018-10-10 16:55:34 +01:00