cofidectl: a CLI for Kubernetes workload identity

cofidectl is a command-line tool that makes it easy to install and manage workload identity providers for Kubernetes, and provide seamless and secure mTLS for applications. It builds on SPIFFE/SPIRE and provides a set of abstractions that make it easy to configure. cofidectl can be used to deploy single cluster instances, or handle federation across multiple clusters.

Note: cofidectl is an early-stage project under active development, so please be aware that it is subject to breaking changes.

Prerequisites

Building a cofidectl binary requires:

• Go 1.22 toolchain
• just as a command runner

To exercise the quickstart requires:

• kind
• kubectl
• Cloud provider kind to expose SPIRE federation endpoints
• ko to build and deploy example application container images

Build

To run the unit tests and build the cofidectl binary:

just build

Quickstart

Deploy a single trust zone Cofide instance

Deploying to a Kubernetes cluster is as simple as a few commands. This example assumes you have a kind cluster named kind and wish to issue SPIFFE identities to workloads for the trust domain cofide-a.test'.

rm -f cofide.yaml
./cofidectl init
./cofidectl trust-zone add cofide-a --trust-domain cofide-a.test --kubernetes-cluster kind --profile kubernetes --kubernetes-context kind-kind

Next up is to add an 'attestation policy' - these are cofidectl rules which are used to describe the properties of a workload and it's environment to determine workload identity issuance. In this example, we will create a policy (namespace-demo) that will enable SPIFFE identities for workloads in the demo namespace.

./cofidectl attestation-policy add kubernetes --name namespace-demo --namespace demo
./cofidectl attestation-policy-binding add --trust-zone cofide-a --attestation-policy namespace-demo

Finally, deploy the changes to the cluster:

./cofidectl up

✅ Installed: Installation completed for cofide-a on cluster kind
✅ Ready: All SPIRE server pods and services are ready for cofide-a in cluster kind
✅ Configured: Post-installation configuration completed for cofide-a on cluster kind

And that's how easy it is to get started! 🚀

If your deployment is stuck on Waiting for SPIRE server pod and service..., it may be that you need to restart cloud-provider-kind in order for it to create an external IP for your SPIRE server.

Deploy an application secured with mTLS

Now let's deploy an application and see how to seamlessly obtain a SPIFFE identity and use it for mTLS.

We've a simple ping-pong application with a client that 'pings' and server that responds with 'pong'. For example purposes, the server and client will both reside in a demo namespace. The Justfile recipes make it quick and easy to apply both:

just -f demos/Justfile deploy-ping-pong kind-kind

Take a look at the logs of the client pod and see the mTLS-enabled ping-pong 🔐:

kubectl logs -n demo deployments/ping-pong-client --follow

2024/11/02 15:45:50 INFO ping...
2024/11/02 15:45:50 INFO ...pong
2024/11/02 15:45:55 INFO ping...
2024/11/02 15:45:55 INFO ...pong

Deploy multiple federated trust zones

Follow this guide to see how to configure and deploy Cofide instances in multiple clusters and establish federated trust between workloads that span trust zones.

Production use cases

cofidectl is a project developed and maintained by Cofide. We're building a workload identity platform that is seamless and secure for multi and hybrid cloud environments. If you have a production use case with need for greater flexibility, control and visibility, with enterprise-level support, please speak with us to find out more about the Cofide early access programme 👀.