Alicloud Vault

Alicloud Vault is a tool to securely store and access Alibaba Cloud credentials in a development environment.

Alicloud Vault stores RAM credentials in your operating system's secure keystore and then generates temporary credentials from those to expose to your shell and applications. It's designed to be complementary to the Aliyun CLI tools, and is aware of your config file and profiles in ~/.aliyun/config.

Full release and documentation will follow very soon.

Installing

You can install Alicloud Vault:

• by downloading the latest release
• on Arch Linux with the official repositories: pacman -S alicloud-vault

Vaulting Backends

The supported vaulting backends are:

• macOS Keychain
• Windows Credential Manager
• Secret Service (Gnome Keyring, KWallet)
• KWallet
• Pass
• Encrypted file

Use the --backend flag or ALICLOUD_VAULT_BACKEND environment variable to specify.

Basic Usage

# Store Alicloud credentials for the "jonsmith" profile
$ alicloud-vault add jonsmith
Enter Access Key Id: ABDCDEFDASDASF
Enter Secret Key: %%%

# Execute a command (using temporary credentials).
$ alicloud-vault exec jonsmith -- aliyun --profile johnsmith ecs DescribeInstances
{
	"Instances": {
		"Instance": [
			{
			}
		]
	}
}

# Export environment variables to new shell context and call Aliyun CLI sequentially
$ alicloud-vault exec jonsmith
$ aliyun --profile johnsmith ecs DescribeInstances

# List credentials
$ alicloud-vault ls
Profile                  Credentials               
=======                  ===========
johnsmith                johnsmith

How it works

alicloud-vault uses Alibaba Cloud's STS service to generate temporary credentials via the AssumeRole API call. These expire in a short period of time, so the risk of leaking credentials is reduced. Note that not all services support STS. You can find the currently supported services here: https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/doc-detail/135527.htm

Alicloud Vault then exposes the temporary credentials to the sub-process through environment variables in the following way

$ alicloud-vault exec jonsmith -- env | grep ALICLOUD
ALICLOUD_VAULT=jonsmith
ALICLOUD_REGION_ID=us-east-1
ALICLOUD_ACCESS_KEY_ID=%%%
ALICLOUD_ACCESS_KEY_SECRET=%%%
ALICLOUD_STS_TOKEN=%%%
ALICLOUD_SESSION_EXPIRATION=2020-03-06T10:02:33Z

Profiles

alicloud-vault is tightly integrated with Aliyun CLI and requires a matching profile in ~/.aliyun/config. This allows you to seamlessly use your Aliyun CLI configuration together with alicloud-vault and aliyun CLI. If you create a new profile in the alicloud-vault it will automatically create a matching profile in ~/.aliyun/config if it does not exist yet. It will read configuration data such as ram_role_arn directly from this profile. Values defined here take precedence over environment variables. Access Key ID and Access Key Secret are always read from the keychain, obviously.

Note that if you do not specify ram_role_arn alicloud-vault will export your long-term credentials to your current shell if you execute alicloud-vault exec <profilename>. You can also force this behavior with the flag --no-session.

Attributes that need to be specified for StsToken mode are

• name (Required) - the name of your profile. This needs to match with your alicloud-vault profile name.
• mode (Required) - Make sure to specify as `StsToken``.
• ram_role_arn (Required) - the full resource id of the role this profile should assume.
• ram_session_name (Required) - the name of the role session.
• expired_seconds (Required) - The TTL of the session token. Minium duration 900 seconds, maximum duration 3600 seconds.
• region_id (Optional) - if not specified the default region of any service endpoint that is to be used
• language (Optional) - the language of the CLI. "en" and "cn" are currently supported.
• site (Optional) - INTL account (intl) or domestic account (domestic)

Example:

{
	"name": "johnsmith",
	"mode": "StsToken",
	"access_key_id": "",
	"access_key_secret": "",
	"sts_token": "",
	"ram_role_name": "",
	"ram_role_arn": "acs:ram::5509671337805201:role/johnsmith-role",
	"ram_session_name": "johnsmith_session",
	"private_key": "",
	"key_pair_name": "",
	"expired_seconds": 900,
	"verified": "",
	"region_id": "eu-central-1",
	"output_format": "json",
	"language": "en",
	"site": "intl",
	"retry_timeout": 0,
	"retry_count": 0
}

Alicloud Vault supports the following environments variables for profile configuration and temporary credential creation. Note that values defined in ~/.aliyun/config always take precendence.

• ALICLOUD_REGION_ID - the region of any service endpoint that is to be used
• ALICLOUD_ROLE_ARN - the full resource id of the role this profile should assume
• ALICLOUD_ROLE_SESSION_NAME - the name of the role session
• ALICLOUD_ASSUME_ROLE_TTL - The TTL of the session token. Minium duration 900 seconds, maximum duration 3600 seconds.

Development

The macOS release builds are currently not code-signed so there will be extra prompts in Keychain.

If you are developing or compiling the alicloud-vault binary yourself, you can generate a self-signed certificate by accessing Keychain Access > Certificate Assistant > Create Certificate > Code Signing Certificate. You can then sign your binary with:

$ go build .
$ codesign --sign "Name of my certificate" ./alicloud-vault

References and Inspiration

• https://github.com/99designs/aws-vault