[CASSANDRA-13971] Automatic certificate management using Vault

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Patch Available
• Priority: Normal
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Fix Version/s: 5.x
• Component/s: Legacy/Streaming and Messaging
• Labels: security
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Stefan Podkowinski
• Created: 20/Oct/17 11:17
• Updated: 07/Mar/23 10:54

Description

We've been adding security features during the last years to enable users to secure their clusters, if they are willing to use them and do so correctly. Some features are powerful and easy to work with, such as role based authorization. Other features that require to manage a local keystore are rather painful to deal with. Think about setting up SSL..

To be fair, keystore related issues and certificate handling hasn't been invented by us. We're just following Java standards there. But that doesn't mean that we absolutely have to, if there are better options. I'd like to give it a shoot and find out if we can automate certificate/key handling (PKI) by using external APIs. In this case, the implementation will be based on Vault. But certificate management services offered by cloud providers may also be able to handle the use-case and I intend to create a generic, pluggable API for that.

Issue Links

• is depended upon by: CASSANDRA-14064 Allow using file based certificates instead of keystores
• is depended upon by: CASSANDRA-14102 Vault support for transparent data encryption
• links to: Cassandra Vault Integration