Harp
Harp is for Harpocrates (Ancient Greek: Ἁρποκράτης) the god of silence, secrets and confidentiality in the Hellenistic religion. - Wikipedia
TL;DR.
Harp is a toolset to handle secret data in a reproducible way by providing a way to describe how your value is technically managed and consistently associated to a predictable secret path with additional metadata (ownership, rotation period, leak severity, etc.).
These values (path => value) form a Bundle stored in an immutable file named a Container. This Container acts as a pivot format to allow Harp commands to communicate and create data management pipelines.
In addition to that, it provides a template engine used to generate various secret values (password, passphrase, crypto keys, etc.) but also as a secret consumer, it merges value placeholders from a file content to render a final configuration file.
Finally, it provides an SDK to allow developers to integrate Harp features in their products, and/or extend the Harp pipeline features by creating new plugins.
Why harp?
- Secret management is in essence a collection of processes that must be auditable, executable and reproducible for infosec and operation requirements;
- Secret provisioning must be designed with secret rotation as a day one task, due to the fact that secret data must be rotated periodically to keep its secret property;
Developersshould negotiate secret value for the secret consumer they are currently developing, by the contract based on a path (reference to the secret) and a value specification (for code contract) without the knowledge of the final deployed value;Secret Operatorsuse different set of tools to achieve secret management operation which increases the error/secret exposure probability due to tool count involved in the process (incompatibility, changes, etc.);- Without a defined secret naming convention, the secret storage becomes difficult to handle in time (naming is hard) and secret naming could not be helped to get a consistent, reliable and flexible secret tree;
- Secret storage backend can use various implementations in different environments and should be provisioned consistently.
Use cases
- If you want to have a
single secret valueand you are asking yourselfhow to generate a strong password- Harp has a template engine with secret value generation functions to allow you to generate such values. - If you have
thousands secretsto handle to deploy your platform/customerson multiple cloud providerswithdifferent secret storages- Harp will help you to define consistent secret provisioning bundles and pipelines. - If you are in the situation when you need an
ephemeral secret storagetobootstrapyour long term cloud secret storage - Harp will help you to create secret containers that can be consumed on deployment. - If you want to
migrate massivelyyour secrets from one secret storage to another - Harp provides you a secret container to store these secrets while they are going to be distributed in other secret storage implementations. - If you have to
alter/modifiya secret (rotation/deprecation/renewal) - Harp provides you aGitOps-ablesecretstorage agnostic operation set, so that you can define a specification to describe how your secret operation is going to be applied offline on the secret container.
How does it work?
Like a Data pipeline but for secret
harp allows you to handle secrets using deterministic pipelines expressed using an atomic series of CLI operations applied to a commonly shared container immutable and standalone filesystem used to store secret collection (Bundle) generated from a template engine via user specification, or external secret value coming from files or external secret storage.
These pipelines use the immutable container filesystem as a data exchange protocol and could be extended for new input, intermediary operation or output via plugins created with the harp SDK.
Immutable transformation
Each applied transformation create a container with transformed data inside. This will enforce container reproducibility by eliminating cumulative side-effects applied to the same container.
The container handles for you the confidentiality and integrity protection applied to the secret collection stored inside and manipulated by copy during the pipeline execution.
What can I do?
New to harp, let's start with onboarding tutorial ! TL;DR - Features overview
Harp provides :
- A methodology to design your secret management;
- Secret naming convention (CSO);
- A defined common language and complete processes to achieve secret management operations;
- A SDK to create your own tools to orchestrate your secret management pipelines;
- A container manipulation library exposed as
github.com/elastic/harp/pkg/container; - A secret bundle specification to store and manipulate secrets exposed as
github.com/elastic/harp/pkg/bundle; - An
on-steroidtemplate engine exposed asgithub.com/elastic/harp/pkg/template - A path name validation library exposed as
github.com/elastic/harp/pkg/cso
- A container manipulation library exposed as
- A CLI for secret management implementation
- CI/CD integration;
- Based on human readable definitions (YAML);
- In order to create auditable and reproducible pipelines.
- An extensible tool which can be enhanced via plugins.
And allows :
- Bundle level operations
- Create a bundle from scratch / template / json (more via plugins);
- Generate a complete bundle using a YAML Descriptor (
BundleTemplate) to describe secret and their usages; - Read value stored in the K/V virtual filesystem;
- Update the K/V virtual filesystem;
- Reproductible patch applied on immutable container (copy-on-write);
- Import / Export to Vault.
- Immutable container level operations
- Seal / Unseal a container for integrity and confidentiality property conservation to enforce at-rest encryption (aes256-gcm96 or chacha20-poly1305);
- Multiple identities sealing algorithm;
FAQ
-
Is it used internally at Elastic? - Yes. It is used to generate bootstrap secrets used to bootstrap the new region infrastructure components. #ChickenEggProblem
-
Harp is only supporting
Vault? - No, it has been published with only vault support builtin, but it supports many other secret storage implementations via plugins. -
What's the difference with
Vault? - Hashicorp Vault is an encrypted highly available K/V store with advanced autorization engine, it doesn't handle secret provisioning for you. You can't ask Vault to generate secrets for your application and store them using a defined logic. Harp is filling this requirement.
License
harp artifacts and source code is released under Apache 2.0 Software License.
Homebrew install
Download a release or build from source.
For stable version
brew tap elastic/harp
brew install elastic/harp/harp
Build instructions
Download a release or build from source.
First time
Check your go version
Only last 2 minor versions of a major are supported.
Harp is compiled with :
$ go version
go version go1.17.2 linux/amd64
Simple go version manager - https://github.com/stefanmaric/g
Install mage
Mage is an alternative to Make where language used is Go. You can install it using 2 different methods.
From source
# Install mage
git clone https://github.com/magefile/mage
cd mage
go run bootstrap.go
From brew formula
brew install mage
Clone repository
git clone [email protected]:elastic/harp.git
# Go to tools submodule
cd harp/tools
# Pull tools sources, compile them and install executable in tools/bin
mage
Daily
export PATH=$HARP_REPO/tools/bin:$PATH
# Build harp in bin folder
mage
Docker
For Tools
You have to build this image once before executing artifact pipelines.
mage docker:tools
For CLI
# or docker image [distroless:static, rootless, noshell]
mage docker:harp
# To execute in the container
docker run --rm -ti --read-only elastic/harp:<version>
Plugins
You can find more Harp feature extensions - https://github.com/elastic/harp-plugins
Community
Here is the list of external projects used as inspiration :
![[config] Config values are not honored with the command line flag](https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/5753507?v=4)
