clan-core/docs/admins/06-secrets.md

06 Secrets with Clan

Clan enables encryption of secrets (such as passwords & keys) ensuring security and ease-of-use among users.

Clan utilizes the sops format and integrates with sops-nix on NixOS machines.

This documentation will guide you through managing secrets with the Clan CLI

1. Initializing Secrets

Create Your Master Keypair

To get started, you'll need to create Your master keypair.

Don't worry — if you've already made one before, this step won't change or overwrite it.

clan secrets key generate

Output:

Public key: age1wkth7uhpkl555g40t8hjsysr20drq286netu8zptw50lmqz7j95sw2t3l7

Generated age private key at '/home/joerg/.config/sops/age/keys.txt' for your user. Please back it up on a secure location or you will lose access to your secrets.
Also add your age public key to the repository with 'clan secrets users add YOUR_USER age1wkth7uhpkl555g40t8hjsysr20drq286netu8zptw50lmqz7j95sw2t3l7' (replace YOUR_USER with your actual username)

⚠️ Important: Make sure to keep a safe backup of the private key you've just created. If it's lost, you won't be able to get to your secrets anymore because they all need the master key to be unlocked.

Note: It's safe to add any secrets created by the clan CLI and placed in your repository to version control systems like git.

Add Your Public Key

clan secrets users add <your_username> <your_public_key>

⚠️ Important: Choose the username same username as on your Setup/Source Machine that you use to control the deployment with.

Once run this will create the following files:

sops/
└── users/
    └── <your_username>/
        └── key.json

2. Adding Machine Keys

New machines in Clan come with age keys stored in ./sops/machines/<machine_name>. To list these machines:

$ clan secrets machines list

For existing machines, add their keys:

$ clan secrets machines add <machine_name> <age_key>

Advanced

To fetch an age key from an SSH host key:

$ ssh-keyscan <domain_name> | nix shell nixpkgs#ssh-to-age -c ssh-to-age

3. Assigning Access

By default, secrets are encrypted for your key. To specify which users and machines can access a secret:

$ clan secrets set --machine <machine1> --machine <machine2> --user <user1> --user <user2> <secret_name>

You can add machines/users to existing secrets without modifying the secret:

$ clan secrets machines add-secret <machine_name> <secret_name>

4. Adding Secrets

$ clan secrets set mysecret
Paste your secret: 

Note: As you type - your secret won't be displayed. Press Enter to save the secret.

5. Retrieving Stored Secrets

$ clan secrets get mysecret

List all Secrets

$ clan secrets list

6. Groups

Clan CLI makes it easy to manage access by allowing you to create groups.

All users within a group inherit access to all secrets of the group.

This feature eases the process of handling permissions for multiple users.

Here's how to get started:

1. Creating Groups:

   Assign users to a new group, e.g., admins:

   $ clan secrets groups add admins <username>
   

2. Listing Groups:

   $ clan secrets groups list
   

3. Assigning Secrets to Groups:

   $ clan secrets groups add-secret <group_name> <secret_name>
   

Further

Secrets in the repository follow this structure:

sops/
├── secrets/
│   └── <secret_name>/
│       ├── secret
│       └── users/
│           └── <your_username>/

The content of the secret is stored encrypted inside the secret file under mysecret.

By default, secrets are encrypted with your key to ensure readability.

NixOS integration

A NixOS machine will automatically import all secrets that are encrypted for the current machine. At runtime it will use the host key to decrypt all secrets into a in-memory, non-persistent filesystem using sops-nix. In your nixos configuration you can get a path to secrets like this config.sops.secrets.<name>.path. Example:

{ config, ...}: {
  sops.secrets.my-password.neededForUsers = true;

  users.users.mic92 = {
    isNormalUser = true;
    passwordFile = config.sops.secrets.my-password.path;
  };
}

See the readme of sops-nix for more examples.

Migration: Importing existing sops-based keys / sops-nix

clan secrets stores each secrets in a single file, whereas sops commonly allows to put all secrets in a yaml or json documents.

If you already happened to use sops-nix, you can migrate by using the clan secrets import-sops command by importing these documents:

% clan secrets import-sops --prefix matchbox- --group admins --machine matchbox nixos/matchbox/secrets/secrets.yaml

This will create secrets for each secret found in nixos/matchbox/secrets/secrets.yaml in a ./sops folder of your repository. Each member of the group admins will be able

Since our clan secret module will auto-import secrets that are encrypted for a particular nixos machine, you can now remove sops.secrets.<secrets> = { }; unless you need to specify more options for the secret like owner/group of the secret file.