Kubernetes has become the go-to orchestrator for running containers. At AIS, we are working with clients using Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), applying our expertise in DevOps. One concern is delivering HTTPS certificates to containerized web applications; let’s use Azure Key Vault to achieve this.

Azure Key Vault is a cloud service that provides hardware security modules (HSMs) for securely storing and delivering secrets, encryption keys, and certificates. The Key Vault FlexVolume driver for Kubernetes offers a means for mounting certificates as files in our containers; this allows us to automate and manage HTTPS certificates for applications without requiring them to access Azure Key Vault directly.

Let’s look at how we can apply this to Kubernetes services that front containers running ASP.NET Core 3.1 applications. We’ll start with a sample application from Microsoft’s .NET Docker repo. You can find the full solution and step-by-step instructions in this aks-keyvault-certs GitHub repo.

We’ll use PFX encoded certificates in our Azure Key Vault for this demo, as they are readily loadable in .NET Core 3.1 for use in Kestrel hosting.

There are a few important details to note:

1. You can retrieve a certificate from Azure Key Vault using the certificate, key or secret object types. To get the full private key certificate, you need to use the “secret” object type.
2. If you import a PFX encoded certificate into Azure Key Vault, getting its secret will return the full PFX file; however, since the API return value is a string and a PFX is a binary file format, the result must be base64 decoded.
3. If you import a certificate using the text encoded PEM format, it is returned as-is and base64 decoding is unnecessary; however, .NET Core does not currently support loading private-key PEM certificates.
4. Since we’ve already authenticated to Key Vault, the resulting PFX file mounted in our container no longer requires the PFX password to load.

Knowing this, if we import a PFX certificate into an Azure Key Vault, we can configure our Kubernetes Deployment YAML to create a volume containing a file containing the certificate secret contents. For example:

volumes:
      - name: aks-keyvault-aspnetcore-httpscert

flexVolume:
          driver: "azure/kv"
          secretRef:
            name: kvcreds
          options:
            # update with your key vault name
            keyvaultname: "YOUR KEY VAULT NAME"
            # update with your AAD tenant
            tenantid: "YOUR KEY VAULT TENANT"
            # The name of the object in Key Vault
            keyvaultobjectnames: "aks-https"
            # Use "secret" to get the full cert
            keyvaultobjecttypes: secret
            # This becomes the file name on the mount.
            keyvaultobjectaliases: "https.pfx.base64"

Then, in our pod specification we can mount the volume and set an environment variable for its path:

env:
        # Set an environment var to the cert path for
        # the application to use.
        - name: HTTPS_CERTIFICATE_PATH
          value: "/certs/https.pfx.base64"
        volumeMounts:
        # Mount the key vault volume to /certs
        - name: aks-keyvault-aspnetcore-httpscert
          mountPath: /certs
          readOnly: true

Finally, in our ASP.NET Core application, we configure Kestrel to use the mounted certificate file for HTTPS endpoints:

public static IHostBuilder CreateHostBuilder(string[] args) =>
            Host.CreateDefaultBuilder(args)
                .ConfigureWebHostDefaults(webBuilder =>
                {
                    webBuilder
                        .UseStartup<Startup>()
                        .UseKestrel(options =>
                        {
                            // configure Kestrel with our HTTPS certificate
                            options.ConfigureHttpsDefaults(ConfigureHttps);
                        });
                });

        private static void ConfigureHttps(HttpsConnectionAdapterOptions options)
        {
            try
            {
                // When we get the certificate from Key Vault as a secret,
                // it provides the entire PFX file but without the password.
                // Since PFX is a binary format and a secret is a string,
                // it is base64 encoded. So we read in the text file and convert
                // it to the bytes to initialize the X509Certificate2.
                var certPath = Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("HTTPS_CERTIFICATE_PATH");
                if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(certPath))
                {
                    var certString = System.IO.File.ReadAllText(certPath);
                    var certBytes = Convert.FromBase64String(certString);
                    var httpsCert = new X509Certificate2(certBytes);

                    Console.WriteLine($"HTTPS cert Subject:    {httpsCert.Subject}");
                    Console.WriteLine($"HTTPS cert Thumbprint: {httpsCert.Thumbprint}");

                    // set the Kestrel HTTPS certificate
                    options.ServerCertificate = httpsCert;
                }
            }
            catch (Exception ex)
            {
                Console.Error.WriteLine($"unable to load https cert: {ex}");
                throw;
            }
        }

See the full working solution in the aks-keyvault-certs repo.

With this approach, we can automate managing HTTPS certificates with Azure Key Vault and delivering them to Azure Kubernetes Service pods running ASP.NET Core applications.