Certificates and Certificate Signing Requests

Kubernetes certificate and trust bundle APIs enable automation of X.509 credential provisioning by providing a programmatic interface for clients of the Kubernetes API to request and obtain X.509 certificates from a Certificate Authority (CA).

There is also experimental (alpha) support for distributing trust bundles.

Certificate signing requests

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.19 [stable]

A CertificateSigningRequest (CSR) resource is used to request that a certificate be signed by a denoted signer, after which the request may be approved or denied before finally being signed.

Request signing process

The CertificateSigningRequest resource type allows a client to ask for an X.509 certificate be issued, based on a signing request. The CertificateSigningRequest object includes a PEM-encoded PKCS#10 signing request in the spec.request field. The CertificateSigningRequest denotes the signer (the recipient that the request is being made to) using the spec.signerName field. Note that spec.signerName is a required key after API version certificates.k8s.io/v1. In Kubernetes v1.22 and later, clients may optionally set the spec.expirationSeconds field to request a particular lifetime for the issued certificate. The minimum valid value for this field is 600, i.e. ten minutes.

Once created, a CertificateSigningRequest must be approved before it can be signed. Depending on the signer selected, a CertificateSigningRequest may be automatically approved by a controller. Otherwise, a CertificateSigningRequest must be manually approved either via the REST API (or client-go) or by running kubectl certificate approve. Likewise, a CertificateSigningRequest may also be denied, which tells the configured signer that it must not sign the request.

For certificates that have been approved, the next step is signing. The relevant signing controller first validates that the signing conditions are met and then creates a certificate. The signing controller then updates the CertificateSigningRequest, storing the new certificate into the status.certificate field of the existing CertificateSigningRequest object. The status.certificate field is either empty or contains a X.509 certificate, encoded in PEM format. The CertificateSigningRequest status.certificate field is empty until the signer does this.

Once the status.certificate field has been populated, the request has been completed and clients can now fetch the signed certificate PEM data from the CertificateSigningRequest resource. The signers can instead deny certificate signing if the approval conditions are not met.

In order to reduce the number of old CertificateSigningRequest resources left in a cluster, a garbage collection controller runs periodically. The garbage collection removes CertificateSigningRequests that have not changed state for some duration:

Approved requests: automatically deleted after 1 hour
Denied requests: automatically deleted after 1 hour
Failed requests: automatically deleted after 1 hour
Pending requests: automatically deleted after 24 hours
All requests: automatically deleted after the issued certificate has expired

Certificate signing authorization

To allow creating a CertificateSigningRequest and retrieving any CertificateSigningRequest:

Verbs: create, get, list, watch, group: certificates.k8s.io, resource: certificatesigningrequests

For example:

access/certificate-signing-request/clusterrole-create.yaml

apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: ClusterRole
metadata:
  name: csr-creator
rules:
- apiGroups:
  - certificates.k8s.io
  resources:
  - certificatesigningrequests
  verbs:
  - create
  - get
  - list
  - watch

To allow approving a CertificateSigningRequest:

Verbs: get, list, watch, group: certificates.k8s.io, resource: certificatesigningrequests
Verbs: update, group: certificates.k8s.io, resource: certificatesigningrequests/approval
Verbs: approve, group: certificates.k8s.io, resource: signers, resourceName: <signerNameDomain>/<signerNamePath> or <signerNameDomain>/*

For example:

access/certificate-signing-request/clusterrole-approve.yaml

apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: ClusterRole
metadata:
  name: csr-approver
rules:
- apiGroups:
  - certificates.k8s.io
  resources:
  - certificatesigningrequests
  verbs:
  - get
  - list
  - watch
- apiGroups:
  - certificates.k8s.io
  resources:
  - certificatesigningrequests/approval
  verbs:
  - update
- apiGroups:
  - certificates.k8s.io
  resources:
  - signers
  resourceNames:
  - example.com/my-signer-name # example.com/* can be used to authorize for all signers in the 'example.com' domain
  verbs:
  - approve

To allow signing a CertificateSigningRequest:

Verbs: get, list, watch, group: certificates.k8s.io, resource: certificatesigningrequests
Verbs: update, group: certificates.k8s.io, resource: certificatesigningrequests/status
Verbs: sign, group: certificates.k8s.io, resource: signers, resourceName: <signerNameDomain>/<signerNamePath> or <signerNameDomain>/*

access/certificate-signing-request/clusterrole-sign.yaml

apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: ClusterRole
metadata:
  name: csr-signer
rules:
- apiGroups:
  - certificates.k8s.io
  resources:
  - certificatesigningrequests
  verbs:
  - get
  - list
  - watch
- apiGroups:
  - certificates.k8s.io
  resources:
  - certificatesigningrequests/status
  verbs:
  - update
- apiGroups:
  - certificates.k8s.io
  resources:
  - signers
  resourceNames:
  - example.com/my-signer-name # example.com/* can be used to authorize for all signers in the 'example.com' domain
  verbs:
  - sign

Signers

Signers abstractly represent the entity or entities that might sign, or have signed, a security certificate.

Any signer that is made available for outside a particular cluster should provide information about how the signer works, so that consumers can understand what that means for CertifcateSigningRequests and (if enabled) ClusterTrustBundles.
This includes:

Trust distribution: how trust anchors (CA certificates or certificate bundles) are distributed.
Permitted subjects: any restrictions on and behavior when a disallowed subject is requested.
Permitted x509 extensions: including IP subjectAltNames, DNS subjectAltNames, Email subjectAltNames, URI subjectAltNames etc, and behavior when a disallowed extension is requested.
Permitted key usages / extended key usages: any restrictions on and behavior when usages different than the signer-determined usages are specified in the CSR.
Expiration/certificate lifetime: whether it is fixed by the signer, configurable by the admin, determined by the CSR spec.expirationSeconds field, etc and the behavior when the signer-determined expiration is different from the CSR spec.expirationSeconds field.
CA bit allowed/disallowed: and behavior if a CSR contains a request a for a CA certificate when the signer does not permit it.

Commonly, the status.certificate field of a CertificateSigningRequest contains a single PEM-encoded X.509 certificate once the CSR is approved and the certificate is issued. Some signers store multiple certificates into the status.certificate field. In that case, the documentation for the signer should specify the meaning of additional certificates; for example, this might be the certificate plus intermediates to be presented during TLS handshakes.

If you want to make the trust anchor (root certificate) available, this should be done separately from a CertificateSigningRequest and its status.certificate field. For example, you could use a ClusterTrustBundle.

The PKCS#10 signing request format does not have a standard mechanism to specify a certificate expiration or lifetime. The expiration or lifetime therefore has to be set through the spec.expirationSeconds field of the CSR object. The built-in signers use the ClusterSigningDuration configuration option, which defaults to 1 year, (the --cluster-signing-duration command-line flag of the kube-controller-manager) as the default when no spec.expirationSeconds is specified. When spec.expirationSeconds is specified, the minimum of spec.expirationSeconds and ClusterSigningDuration is used.

Note: The spec.expirationSeconds field was added in Kubernetes v1.22. Earlier versions of Kubernetes do not honor this field. Kubernetes API servers prior to v1.22 will silently drop this field when the object is created.

Kubernetes signers

Kubernetes provides built-in signers that each have a well-known signerName:

kubernetes.io/kube-apiserver-client: signs certificates that will be honored as client certificates by the API server. Never auto-approved by kube-controller-manager.
1. Trust distribution: signed certificates must be honored as client certificates by the API server. The CA bundle is not distributed by any other means.
2. Permitted subjects - no subject restrictions, but approvers and signers may choose not to approve or sign. Certain subjects like cluster-admin level users or groups vary between distributions and installations, but deserve additional scrutiny before approval and signing. The CertificateSubjectRestriction admission plugin is enabled by default to restrict system:masters, but it is often not the only cluster-admin subject in a cluster.
3. Permitted x509 extensions - honors subjectAltName and key usage extensions and discards other extensions.
4. Permitted key usages - must include ["client auth"]. Must not include key usages beyond ["digital signature", "key encipherment", "client auth"].
5. Expiration/certificate lifetime - for the kube-controller-manager implementation of this signer, set to the minimum of the --cluster-signing-duration option or, if specified, the spec.expirationSeconds field of the CSR object.
6. CA bit allowed/disallowed - not allowed.
kubernetes.io/kube-apiserver-client-kubelet: signs client certificates that will be honored as client certificates by the API server. May be auto-approved by kube-controller-manager.
1. Trust distribution: signed certificates must be honored as client certificates by the API server. The CA bundle is not distributed by any other means.
2. Permitted subjects - organizations are exactly ["system:nodes"], common name starts with "system:node:".
3. Permitted x509 extensions - honors key usage extensions, forbids subjectAltName extensions and drops other extensions.
4. Permitted key usages - ["key encipherment", "digital signature", "client auth"] or ["digital signature", "client auth"].
5. Expiration/certificate lifetime - for the kube-controller-manager implementation of this signer, set to the minimum of the --cluster-signing-duration option or, if specified, the spec.expirationSeconds field of the CSR object.
6. CA bit allowed/disallowed - not allowed.
kubernetes.io/kubelet-serving: signs serving certificates that are honored as a valid kubelet serving certificate by the API server, but has no other guarantees. Never auto-approved by kube-controller-manager.
1. Trust distribution: signed certificates must be honored by the API server as valid to terminate connections to a kubelet. The CA bundle is not distributed by any other means.
2. Permitted subjects - organizations are exactly ["system:nodes"], common name starts with "system:node:".
3. Permitted x509 extensions - honors key usage and DNSName/IPAddress subjectAltName extensions, forbids EmailAddress and URI subjectAltName extensions, drops other extensions. At least one DNS or IP subjectAltName must be present.
4. Permitted key usages - ["key encipherment", "digital signature", "server auth"] or ["digital signature", "server auth"].
5. Expiration/certificate lifetime - for the kube-controller-manager implementation of this signer, set to the minimum of the --cluster-signing-duration option or, if specified, the spec.expirationSeconds field of the CSR object.
6. CA bit allowed/disallowed - not allowed.
kubernetes.io/legacy-unknown: has no guarantees for trust at all. Some third-party distributions of Kubernetes may honor client certificates signed by it. The stable CertificateSigningRequest API (version certificates.k8s.io/v1 and later) does not allow to set the signerName as kubernetes.io/legacy-unknown. Never auto-approved by kube-controller-manager.
1. Trust distribution: None. There is no standard trust or distribution for this signer in a Kubernetes cluster.
2. Permitted subjects - any
3. Permitted x509 extensions - honors subjectAltName and key usage extensions and discards other extensions.
4. Permitted key usages - any
5. Expiration/certificate lifetime - for the kube-controller-manager implementation of this signer, set to the minimum of the --cluster-signing-duration option or, if specified, the spec.expirationSeconds field of the CSR object.
6. CA bit allowed/disallowed - not allowed.

The kube-controller-manager implements control plane signing for each of the built in signers. Failures for all of these are only reported in kube-controller-manager logs.

Distribution of trust happens out of band for these signers. Any trust outside of those described above are strictly coincidental. For instance, some distributions may honor kubernetes.io/legacy-unknown as client certificates for the kube-apiserver, but this is not a standard. None of these usages are related to ServiceAccount token secrets .data[ca.crt] in any way. That CA bundle is only guaranteed to verify a connection to the API server using the default service (kubernetes.default.svc).

Custom signers

You can also introduce your own custom signer, which should have a similar prefixed name but using your own domain name. For example, if you represent an open source project that uses the domain open-fictional.example then you might use issuer.open-fictional.example/service-mesh as a signer name.

A custom signer uses the Kubernetes API to issue a certificate. See API-based signers.

Signing

Control plane signer

The Kubernetes control plane implements each of the Kubernetes signers, as part of the kube-controller-manager.

Note: Prior to Kubernetes v1.18, the kube-controller-manager would sign any CSRs that were marked as approved.

API-based signers

Users of the REST API can sign CSRs by submitting an UPDATE request to the status subresource of the CSR to be signed.

As part of this request, the status.certificate field should be set to contain the signed certificate. This field contains one or more PEM-encoded certificates.

All PEM blocks must have the "CERTIFICATE" label, contain no headers, and the encoded data must be a BER-encoded ASN.1 Certificate structure as described in section 4 of RFC5280.

Example certificate content:

Non-PEM content may appear before or after the CERTIFICATE PEM blocks and is unvalidated, to allow for explanatory text as described in section 5.2 of RFC7468.

When encoded in JSON or YAML, this field is base-64 encoded. A CertificateSigningRequest containing the example certificate above would look like this:

apiVersion: certificates.k8s.io/v1
kind: CertificateSigningRequest
...
status:
  certificate: "LS0tLS1CRUdJTiBDRVJUSUZJQ0FURS0tLS0tCk1JS..."

Approval or rejection

Before a signer issues a certificate based on a CertificateSigningRequest, the signer typically checks that the issuance for that CSR has been approved.

Control plane automated approval

The kube-controller-manager ships with a built-in approver for certificates with a signerName of kubernetes.io/kube-apiserver-client-kubelet that delegates various permissions on CSRs for node credentials to authorization. The kube-controller-manager POSTs SubjectAccessReview resources to the API server in order to check authorization for certificate approval.

Approval or rejection using `kubectl`

A Kubernetes administrator (with appropriate permissions) can manually approve (or deny) CertificateSigningRequests by using the kubectl certificate approve and kubectl certificate deny commands.

To approve a CSR with kubectl:

kubectl certificate approve <certificate-signing-request-name>

Likewise, to deny a CSR:

kubectl certificate deny <certificate-signing-request-name>

Approval or rejection using the Kubernetes API

Users of the REST API can approve CSRs by submitting an UPDATE request to the approval subresource of the CSR to be approved. For example, you could write an operator that watches for a particular kind of CSR and then sends an UPDATE to approve them.

When you make an approval or rejection request, set either the Approved or Denied status condition based on the state you determine:

For Approved CSRs:

apiVersion: certificates.k8s.io/v1
kind: CertificateSigningRequest
...
status:
  conditions:
  - lastUpdateTime: "2020-02-08T11:37:35Z"
    lastTransitionTime: "2020-02-08T11:37:35Z"
    message: Approved by my custom approver controller
    reason: ApprovedByMyPolicy # You can set this to any string
    type: Approved

For Denied CSRs:

apiVersion: certificates.k8s.io/v1
kind: CertificateSigningRequest
...
status:
  conditions:
  - lastUpdateTime: "2020-02-08T11:37:35Z"
    lastTransitionTime: "2020-02-08T11:37:35Z"
    message: Denied by my custom approver controller
    reason: DeniedByMyPolicy # You can set this to any string
    type: Denied

It's usual to set status.conditions.reason to a machine-friendly reason code using TitleCase; this is a convention but you can set it to anything you like. If you want to add a note for human consumption, use the status.conditions.message field.

Cluster trust bundles

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.27 [alpha]

Note: In Kubernetes 1.28, you must enable the ClusterTrustBundles feature gate and the certificates.k8s.io/v1alpha1 in order to use this API.

A ClusterTrustBundles is a cluster-scoped object for distributing X.509 trust anchors (root certificates) to workloads within the cluster. They're designed to work well with the signer concept from CertificateSigningRequests.

ClusterTrustBundles can be used in two modes: signer-linked and signer-unlinked.

Common properties and validation

All ClusterTrustBundle objects have strong validation on the contents of their trustBundle field. That field must contain one or more X.509 certificates, DER-serialized, each wrapped in a PEM CERTIFICATE block. The certificates must parse as valid X.509 certificates.

Esoteric PEM features like inter-block data and intra-block headers are either rejected during object validation, or can be ignored by consumers of the object. Additionally, consumers are allowed to reorder the certificates in the bundle with their own arbitrary but stable ordering.

ClusterTrustBundle objects should be considered world-readable within the cluster. If your cluster uses RBAC authorization, all ServiceAccounts have a default grant that allows them to get, list, and watch all ClusterTrustBundle objects. If you use your own authorization mechanism and you have enabled ClusterTrustBundles in your cluster, you should set up an equivalent rule to make these objects public within the cluster, so that they work as intended.

If you do not have permission to list cluster trust bundles by default in your cluster, you can impersonate a service account you have access to in order to see available ClusterTrustBundles:

kubectl get clustertrustbundles --as='system:serviceaccount:mynamespace:default'

Signer-linked ClusterTrustBundles

Signer-linked ClusterTrustBundles are associated with a signer name, like this:

apiVersion: certificates.k8s.io/v1alpha1
kind: ClusterTrustBundle
metadata:
  name: example.com:mysigner:foo
spec:
  signerName: example.com/mysigner
  trustBundle: "<... PEM data ...>"

These ClusterTrustBundles are intended to be maintained by a signer-specific controller in the cluster, so they have several security features:

To create or update a signer-linked ClusterTrustBundle, you must be permitted to attest on the signer (custom authorization verb attest, API group certificates.k8s.io; resource path signers). You can configure authorization for the specific resource name <signerNameDomain>/<signerNamePath> or match a pattern such as <signerNameDomain>/*.
Signer-linked ClusterTrustBundles must be named with a prefix derived from their spec.signerName field. Slashes (/) are replaced with colons (:), and a final colon is appended. This is followed by an arbitary name. For example, the signer example.com/mysigner can be linked to a ClusterTrustBundle example.com:mysigner:<arbitrary-name>.

Signer-linked ClusterTrustBundles will typically be consumed in workloads by a combination of a field selector on the signer name, and a separate label selector.

Signer-unlinked ClusterTrustBundles

Signer-unlinked ClusterTrustBundles have an empty spec.signerName field, like this:

apiVersion: certificates.k8s.io/v1alpha1
kind: ClusterTrustBundle
metadata:
  name: foo
spec:
  # no signerName specified, so the field is blank
  trustBundle: "<... PEM data ...>"

They are primarily intended for cluster configuration use cases. Each signer-unlinked ClusterTrustBundle is an independent object, in contrast to the customary grouping behavior of signer-linked ClusterTrustBundles.

Signer-unlinked ClusterTrustBundles have no attest verb requirement. Instead, you control access to them directly using the usual mechanisms, such as role-based access control.

To distinguish them from signer-linked ClusterTrustBundles, the names of signer-unlinked ClusterTrustBundles must not contain a colon (:).

How to issue a certificate for a user

A few steps are required in order to get a normal user to be able to authenticate and invoke an API. First, this user must have a certificate issued by the Kubernetes cluster, and then present that certificate to the Kubernetes API.

Create private key

The following scripts show how to generate PKI private key and CSR. It is important to set CN and O attribute of the CSR. CN is the name of the user and O is the group that this user will belong to. You can refer to RBAC for standard groups.

openssl genrsa -out myuser.key 2048
openssl req -new -key myuser.key -out myuser.csr

Create a CertificateSigningRequest

Create a CertificateSigningRequest and submit it to a Kubernetes Cluster via kubectl. Below is a script to generate the CertificateSigningRequest.

cat <<EOF | kubectl apply -f -
apiVersion: certificates.k8s.io/v1
kind: CertificateSigningRequest
metadata:
  name: myuser
spec:
  request: LS0tLS1CRUdJTiBDRVJUSUZJQ0FURSBSRVFVRVNULS0tLS0KTUlJQ1ZqQ0NBVDRDQVFBd0VURVBNQTBHQTFVRUF3d0dZVzVuWld4aE1JSUJJakFOQmdrcWhraUc5dzBCQVFFRgpBQU9DQVE4QU1JSUJDZ0tDQVFFQTByczhJTHRHdTYxakx2dHhWTTJSVlRWMDNHWlJTWWw0dWluVWo4RElaWjBOCnR2MUZtRVFSd3VoaUZsOFEzcWl0Qm0wMUFSMkNJVXBGd2ZzSjZ4MXF3ckJzVkhZbGlBNVhwRVpZM3ExcGswSDQKM3Z3aGJlK1o2MVNrVHF5SVBYUUwrTWM5T1Nsbm0xb0R2N0NtSkZNMUlMRVI3QTVGZnZKOEdFRjJ6dHBoaUlFMwpub1dtdHNZb3JuT2wzc2lHQ2ZGZzR4Zmd4eW8ybmlneFNVekl1bXNnVm9PM2ttT0x1RVF6cXpkakJ3TFJXbWlECklmMXBMWnoyalVnald4UkhCM1gyWnVVV1d1T09PZnpXM01LaE8ybHEvZi9DdS8wYk83c0x0MCt3U2ZMSU91TFcKcW90blZtRmxMMytqTy82WDNDKzBERHk5aUtwbXJjVDBnWGZLemE1dHJRSURBUUFCb0FBd0RRWUpLb1pJaHZjTgpBUUVMQlFBRGdnRUJBR05WdmVIOGR4ZzNvK21VeVRkbmFjVmQ1N24zSkExdnZEU1JWREkyQTZ1eXN3ZFp1L1BVCkkwZXpZWFV0RVNnSk1IRmQycVVNMjNuNVJsSXJ3R0xuUXFISUh5VStWWHhsdnZsRnpNOVpEWllSTmU3QlJvYXgKQVlEdUI5STZXT3FYbkFvczFqRmxNUG5NbFpqdU5kSGxpT1BjTU1oNndLaTZzZFhpVStHYTJ2RUVLY01jSVUyRgpvU2djUWdMYTk0aEpacGk3ZnNMdm1OQUxoT045UHdNMGM1dVJVejV4T0dGMUtCbWRSeEgvbUNOS2JKYjFRQm1HCkkwYitEUEdaTktXTU0xMzhIQXdoV0tkNjVoVHdYOWl4V3ZHMkh4TG1WQzg0L1BHT0tWQW9FNkpsYWFHdTlQVmkKdjlOSjVaZlZrcXdCd0hKbzZXdk9xVlA3SVFjZmg3d0drWm89Ci0tLS0tRU5EIENFUlRJRklDQVRFIFJFUVVFU1QtLS0tLQo=
  signerName: kubernetes.io/kube-apiserver-client
  expirationSeconds: 86400  # one day
  usages:
  - client auth
EOF

Some points to note:

usages has to be 'client auth'
expirationSeconds could be made longer (i.e. 864000 for ten days) or shorter (i.e. 3600 for one hour)
request is the base64 encoded value of the CSR file content. You can get the content using this command:
```
cat myuser.csr | base64 | tr -d "\n"
```

Approve the CertificateSigningRequest

Use kubectl to create a CSR and approve it.

Get the list of CSRs:

kubectl get csr

Approve the CSR:

kubectl certificate approve myuser

Get the certificate

Retrieve the certificate from the CSR:

kubectl get csr/myuser -o yaml

The certificate value is in Base64-encoded format under status.certificate.

Export the issued certificate from the CertificateSigningRequest.

kubectl get csr myuser -o jsonpath='{.status.certificate}'| base64 -d > myuser.crt

Create Role and RoleBinding

With the certificate created it is time to define the Role and RoleBinding for this user to access Kubernetes cluster resources.

This is a sample command to create a Role for this new user:

kubectl create role developer --verb=create --verb=get --verb=list --verb=update --verb=delete --resource=pods

This is a sample command to create a RoleBinding for this new user:

kubectl create rolebinding developer-binding-myuser --role=developer --user=myuser

Add to kubeconfig

The last step is to add this user into the kubeconfig file.

First, you need to add new credentials:

kubectl config set-credentials myuser --client-key=myuser.key --client-certificate=myuser.crt --embed-certs=true

Then, you need to add the context:

kubectl config set-context myuser --cluster=kubernetes --user=myuser

To test it, change the context to myuser:

kubectl config use-context myuser

What's next

Read Manage TLS Certificates in a Cluster
View the source code for the kube-controller-manager built in signer
View the source code for the kube-controller-manager built in approver
For details of X.509 itself, refer to RFC 5280 section 3.1
For information on the syntax of PKCS#10 certificate signing requests, refer to RFC 2986

Last modified August 24, 2023 at 6:38 PM PST: Use code_sample shortcode instead of code shortcode (e8b136c3b3)

Certificates and Certificate Signing Requests

Certificate signing requests

Request signing process

Certificate signing authorization

Signers

Kubernetes signers

Custom signers

Signing

Control plane signer

API-based signers

Approval or rejection

Control plane automated approval

Approval or rejection using kubectl

Approval or rejection using the Kubernetes API

Cluster trust bundles

Common properties and validation

Signer-linked ClusterTrustBundles

Signer-unlinked ClusterTrustBundles

How to issue a certificate for a user

Create private key

Create a CertificateSigningRequest

Approve the CertificateSigningRequest

Get the certificate

Create Role and RoleBinding

Add to kubeconfig

What's next

Feedback

Approval or rejection using `kubectl`