About AWS Security Token Service
To assign IAM roles that provide short-term, limited-privilege security credentials to your cluster components, you can configure your cluster to use manual mode with Security Token Service (STS), allowing the individual Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform components to use the AWS STS.
These credentials are associated with IAM roles that are specific to each component that makes AWS API calls.
AWS Security Token Service authentication process
You should familiarize yourself with the process that the AWS Security Token Service (STS) and the AssumeRole API action perform to allow pods to retrieve access keys that are defined by an IAM role policy.
The Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform cluster includes a Kubernetes service account signing service. This service uses a private key to sign service account JSON web tokens (JWT). A pod that requires a service account token requests one through the pod specification. When the pod is created and assigned to a node, the node retrieves a signed service account from the service account signing service and mounts it onto the pod.
Clusters that use STS contain an IAM role ID in their Kubernetes configuration secrets. Workloads assume the identity of this IAM role ID. The signed service account token issued to the workload aligns with the configuration in AWS, which allows AWS STS to grant access keys for the specified IAM role to the workload.
AWS STS grants access keys only for requests that include service account tokens that meet the following conditions:
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The token name and namespace match the service account name and namespace.
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The token is signed by a key that matches the public key.
The public key pair for the service account signing key used by the cluster is stored in an AWS S3 bucket. AWS STS federation validates that the service account token signature aligns with the public key stored in the S3 bucket.
The following diagram illustrates the authentication flow between AWS and the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform cluster when using AWS STS.
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Token signing is the Kubernetes service account signing service on the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform cluster.
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The Kubernetes service account in the pod is the signed service account token.
Requests for new and refreshed credentials are automated by using an appropriately configured AWS IAM OpenID Connect (OIDC) identity provider combined with AWS IAM roles. Service account tokens that are trusted by AWS IAM are signed by Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and can be projected into a pod and used for authentication.
The signed service account token that a pod uses expires after a period of time. For clusters that use AWS STS, this time period is 3600 seconds, or one hour.
The kubelet on the node that the pod is assigned to ensures that the token is refreshed. The kubelet attempts to rotate a token when it is older than 80 percent of its time to live.
You can store the public portion of the encryption keys for your OIDC configuration in a public or private S3 bucket.
The OIDC spec requires the use of HTTPS. AWS services require a public endpoint to expose the OIDC documents in the form of JSON web key set (JWKS) public keys. This allows AWS services to validate the bound tokens signed by Kubernetes and determine whether to trust certificates. As a result, both S3 bucket options require a public HTTPS endpoint and private endpoints are not supported.
To use AWS STS, the public AWS backbone for the AWS STS service must be able to communicate with a public S3 bucket or a private S3 bucket with a public CloudFront endpoint. You can choose which type of bucket to use when you process CredentialsRequest objects during installation:
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By default, the CCO utility (
ccoctl) stores the OIDC configuration files in a public S3 bucket and uses the S3 URL as the public OIDC endpoint. -
As an alternative, you can have the
ccoctlutility store the OIDC configuration in a private S3 bucket that is accessed by the IAM identity provider through a public CloudFront distribution URL.
AWS component secret permissions requirements
You should familiarize yourself with the permissions required by the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform components. These values are in the CredentialsRequest custom resource (CR) for each component.
Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform components require the following permissions:
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These permissions apply to all resources. Unless specified, there are no request conditions on these permissions. |
| Component | Custom resource | Required permissions for services |
|---|---|---|
Cluster CAPI Operator |
|
EC2
Elastic load balancing
Identity and Access Management (IAM)
Key Management Service (KMS)
|
Machine API Operator |
|
EC2
Elastic load balancing
Identity and Access Management (IAM)
Key Management Service (KMS)
|
Cloud Credential Operator |
|
Identity and Access Management (IAM)
|
Cluster Image Registry Operator |
|
S3
|
Ingress Operator |
|
Elastic load balancing
Route 53
Tag
Security Token Service (STS)
|
Cluster Network Operator |
|
EC2
|
AWS Elastic Block Store CSI Driver Operator |
|
EC2
Key Management Service (KMS)
|
-
Request condition:
kms:GrantIsForAWSResource: true
OLM-managed Operator support for authentication with AWS STS
To allow certain Operators that are managed by the Operator Lifecycle Manager (OLM) on AWS clusters to authenticate with limited-privilege, short-term credentials that are managed outside the cluster, you can use manual mode with STS.
To determine if an Operator supports authentication with AWS STS, see the Operator description in the software catalog.