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Status Under review
Workspace Operational Decision Manager
Created by Guest
Created on Jun 13, 2024

RELATED IDEAS

ODM Helm deployments in OpenShift - related to security requirements for handling passwords and secrets.

The main issue is how passwords/secrets are managed within ODM Helm chart deployments in OpenShift.

Since unencrypted passwords (i.e. cleartext) cannot be used due to your security requirements, CyberArk is being used as a credential vault 

to manage IAM resource at USAA across the enterprise to avoid usage of cleartext passwords anywhere.

 However, this still presents a deployment issue whenever passwords need to be changed or rotated on a recurring basis 

as the ODM deployments in OpenShift require an update or redeployment if a password has changed, due to secrets becoming invalid.

1) The main painpoint with this approach is that USAA is not able to rely on the standard Kubernetes replicaSet for the rollout of the updated credentials (such as the SQL Server database password) without having some downtime in the pods due to their custom process. This impact causes a temporary outage for the ODM users and the business impact is substantial for your critical lines of business.

2) Another, less-critical security issue than the first, is the inabiity for the Decision Center Business and RES Consoles to directly support unencrypted passwords for some of the functions.

  Within Decision Center Administration --> Servers tab, a list of servers is maintained for the various RES and Decision Runner URLs which require service accounts and credentials.

 These resources do not easily support seamless integration with CyberArk vault.

 This impact does not incur an outage at the pod level, but is a maintenance challenge for the support teams whenever a password is changed/rotated.

Idea priority High
  • Guest
    Reply
    |     Jun 13, 2024

    Adding additional customer input, which seems to be missing from initial submission:

    issue #1. The only things I will add on is that addressing secrets, depending on the solution, can be considered separate from the ODM not supporting password vaults. Also, from an operational perspective, while both Decision Center and RES are impacted by these problems the RES is higher priority because we can allow downtime on release of Decision Center. For our RES we cannot have any downtime during a release.

    Just for additional context, USAA infrastructure utilizes alias that map to two service accounts, so that it’s possible to rotate service accounts as needed for maintenance, along with a security requirement for periodic password rotation of our service accounts. We have created a custom solution that from the alias retrieves one of the service accounts and its respective password and sets the secret as part of the helm deployment. The issue comes with service account and password rotations. Or whenever we are doing a deployment that requires any change to the secrets.

    While we continue to try build custom work arounds internally to USAA this comes with overhead of maintenance along with the fact these custom solutions usually break on upgrades, which delays our ability to move to newer versions. 

    As for issue #2 some clarification. We are unable to inject (like we do for the ldap sync) or utilize Openshift secrets for the service account/password for ONLY Decision Center “Test and Simulation Execution” and “Decision Service Execution”. We have a solution for RES and the rest of the URLs in Decision Center.

    To work around this issue, we have “unmanaged” service account and password (which is to say a person knows the password and manually enters it). However, this is only allowed for of a year before we get push back on this this.

    I appreciate your time and attention to these issues.

    Amanda Videtich @USAA

     

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