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Use CyberArk Workload Identity Manager as a service mesh certificate authority

This page describes the use of CyberArk Workload Identity Manager as the certificate authority for the Consul service mesh.

Enterprise

This feature requires Consul Enterprise. Refer to the enterprise feature matrix for additional information.

Introduction

You can configure Consul to use CyberArk Workload Identity Manager as the certificate authority (CA) so that Workload Identity Manager can manage and sign certificates distributed to services in the mesh.

Requirements

  • Consul 2.0.0 or higher

Recommendations

Enable CyberArk Workload Identity Manager as the CA

Follow these steps to enable CyberArk Workload Identity Manager as the CA for the Consul service mesh:

Enable CyberArk Workload Identity Manager as the CA by configuring Consul to use "pan-distributed-issuer" as the CA provider and including the required provider configuration options.

Provide the CA configuration in the server agent configuration file or in the body of a PUT request to the /connect/ca/configuration API endpoint. Refer to the configuration reference section for details about configuration options and for example use cases.

The following example shows the required configurations for a default implementation:

Service mesh CA configuration

/etc/consul.d/config.hcl

## ...
connect { 

  enabled     = true 
  ca_provider = "pan-distributed-issuer" 

  ca_config { 
    # Auth options  
    address = "https://wim.internal.corp:8002" 
    chainAddress = "http://wim-discovery.internal.corp:8008"
    token = "..."  
    policy = "consul-service-mesh-workload-policy" 

    leaf_cert_ttl         = "72h" 
    intermediate_cert_ttl = "240h" 
    root_cert_ttl         = "8760h" 
  } 
}
## ...

Configuration reference

The first key refers to the option name for use in API calls, and the key after the slash refers to the corresponding option name in the agent configuration file.

  • Address / address (string: <required>) - The address of the CyberArk Workload Identity Manager server.

  • ChainAddress / chainAddress (string: "") - The network address of the endpoint responsible for serving the full CA certificate chain (the Root CA and any Intermediates).

  • Token / token (string: "") - A token for accessing CyberArk Workload Identity Manager.

  • Policy / policy (string: "") - The name of the specific Certificate Policy or Identity Policy defined within CyberArk WIM that governs issuance.

Common CA Config Options

The following configuration options are supported by all CA providers:

  • CSRMaxConcurrent / csr_max_concurrent (int: 0) - Sets a limit on the number of Certificate Signing Requests that can be processed concurrently. Defaults to 0 (disabled). This is useful when you want to limit the number of CPU cores available to the server for certificate signing operations. For example, on an 8 core server, setting this to 1 will ensure that no more than one CPU core will be consumed when generating or rotating certificates. Setting this is recommended instead of csr_max_per_second when you want to limit the number of cores consumed since it is simpler to reason about limiting CSR resources this way without artificially slowing down rotations. Added in 1.4.1.

  • CSRMaxPerSecond / csr_max_per_second (float: 50) - Sets a rate limit on the maximum number of Certificate Signing Requests (CSRs) the servers will accept. This is used to prevent CA rotation from causing unbounded CPU usage on servers. It defaults to 50 which is conservative – a 2017 MacBook can process about 100 per second using only ~40% of one CPU core – but sufficient for deployments up to ~1500 service instances before the time it takes to rotate is impacted. For larger deployments we recommend increasing this based on the expected number of server instances and server resources, or use csr_max_concurrent instead if servers have more than one CPU core. Setting this to zero disables rate limiting. Added in 1.4.1.

  • LeafCertTTL / leaf_cert_ttl (duration: "72h") - The upper bound on the lease duration of a leaf certificate issued for a service. In most cases a new leaf certificate will be requested by a proxy before this limit is reached. This is also the effective limit on how long a server outage can last (with no leader) before network connections will start being rejected. Defaults to 72h. This value cannot be lower than 1 hour or higher than 1 year.

    This value is also used when rotating out old root certificates from the cluster. When a root certificate has been inactive (rotated out) for more than twice the current leaf_cert_ttl, it will be removed from the trusted list.

  • RootCertTTL / root_cert_ttl (duration: "87600h") The time to live (TTL) for a root certificate. Defaults to 10 years as 87600h. This value, if provided, needs to be higher than the intermediate certificate TTL.

    This setting applies to all Consul CA providers.

    For the Vault provider, this value is only used if the backend is not initialized at first.

  • IntermediateCertTTL / intermediate_cert_ttl (duration: "8760h") The time to live (TTL) for any intermediate certificates signed by root certificate of the primary datacenter. This field is only valid in the primary datacenter. Defaults to 1 year as 8760h.

    This setting applies to all Consul CA providers.

    For the Vault provider, this value is only used if the backend is not initialized at first.

  • PrivateKeyType / private_key_type (string: "ec") - The type of key to generate for this CA. This is only used when the provider is generating a new key. If private_key is set for the Consul provider, or existing root or intermediate PKI paths given for Vault then this will be ignored. Currently supported options are ec or rsa. Default is ec.

    It is required that all servers in a datacenter have the same config for the CA. It is recommended that servers in different datacenters use the same key type and size, although the built-in CA and Vault provider will both allow mixed CA key types.

    Some CA providers (currently Vault) will not allow cross-signing a new CA certificate with a different key type. This means that if you migrate from an RSA-keyed Vault CA to an EC-keyed CA from any provider, you may have to proceed without cross-signing which risks temporary connection issues for workloads during the new certificate rollout. We highly recommend testing this outside of production to understand the impact, and suggest sticking to same key type where possible.

    Note: This only affects CA keys generated by the provider. Leaf certificate keys are always EC 256 regardless of the CA configuration.

  • PrivateKeyBits / private_key_bits (string: "") - The length of key to generate for this CA. This is only used when the provider is generating a new key. If private_key is set for the Consul provider, or existing root or intermediate PKI paths given for Vault then this will be ignored.

    Currently supported values are:

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