WirePact Contract Repository

This repository represents the WirePact contract repository to manage trust contracts for the WirePact distributed authentication system. The contract repository is composed by two applications: API and GUI. The API is a gRPC API that allows CRUD operations on contracts and a utility method to fetch all public certificates for a certain participant. This information is considered "public" since there are only public keys of the involved PKIs. The API however should not be publicly accessible since it would enable anyone with a gRPC cli to delete your contracts.

The GUI is a single page application based on "Lit" that allows simple management of the contracts via the gRPC API. The GUI is a static site build that is served by NGINX. One is adviced to protect the GUI application with some sort of authentication (basic auth or OAuth2.0) to prevent unauthorized access.

API

The API is a rust gRPC application that serves as contract backend. It contains two storage adapters (for now): "local" and "Kubernetes". Local means, that the contracts are serialized to the local filesystem under the ./data directory. "Kubernetes" configures the API in such a way that Kubernetes Secrets (V1Secret) are used to store the contracts. Be aware that the API needs access to create, modify, and delete Kubernetes Secrets if deployed with the Kubernetes storage adapter.

To view the possible API calls, see "contracts.proto" for more information.

As mentioned, the API should not be publicly accessible. If you don't deploy the provided GUI, you may also use Kubernetes port forwardings to locally access the API and manage the contracts.

Configuration

The API can be configured via environment variables or command line arguments.

• API_KEY --api-key <API_KEY>: The API key used for authenticating requests against the API (required)
• PORT (-p | --port <PORT>): The port on which the API listens for connections (defaults to 8080)
• STORAGE (-s | --storage <STORAGE>): The storage adapter to use (defaults to local)
• DEBUG (-d | --debug): Enables debug logging (defaults to false)

Management GUI

The GUI application provides simple access to the API. It is a statically built single page application based on the "Lit" framework. The GUI is served by NGINX. To prevent unauthorized access, the GUI should be deployed with some authentication mechanism (basic auth, OAuth2.0, or some other means of authentication).

The basic function to create a contract requires two or more participants to be added to the contract. Each participant has a name and a certificate public key. The public key can either be entered manually or via the PKI API.

If the automatic way is used, you must provide either the direct hostname on which the PKI will respond (if openly awailable), or the proxied host. When you are using the proxy method, you can either choose to use the http_proxy or the https_proxy route to access the PKI.

Please consider the following diagrams to understand the access to the PKI.

sequenceDiagram
    participant GUI
    participant NGINX
    participant PKI
    Note right of GUI: Use direct PKI host
    GUI->>+PKI: Fetch CA (host: https://mypki.com)
    PKI->>-GUI: Return public key of certificate

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sequenceDiagram
    participant GUI
    participant NGINX
    participant PKI
    Note right of GUI: Use proxy PKI host
    GUI->>+NGINX: Fetch CA (host: /http_proxy/my_pki:8080)
    NGINX->>NGINX: Resolve host "my_pki"
    NGINX->>+PKI: Fetch CA
    PKI->>-NGINX: Return public key
    NGINX->>-GUI: Return public key

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With the proxy variant, it is possible to access non public PKIs. This could be the case when the system is deployed within one Kubernetes cluster and the GUI should access the PKI within the same cluster.

Configuration

The GUI can be configured with several environment variables. Two are required, while one is optional and allows proxying the PKI requests.

• PORT: The port on which NGINX listens for connections (defaults to 80)
• REPO_HOST: The hostname of the contract API (above)
• REPO_API_KEY: The API key of the repository, automatically added to API calls
• DNS_SERVER: If configured, allows access via the http_proxy (or https_proxy) route to PKIs that are not publicly accessible