README ¶
opa-envoy-plugin
This repository contains an extended version of OPA (OPA-Envoy) that allows you to enforce OPA policies with Envoy.
Issue Management
Use OPA GitHub Issues to request features or file bugs.
Examples with Envoy-based service meshes
The OPA-Envoy plugin can be deployed with Envoy-based service meshes such as:
Overview
OPA-Envoy extends OPA with a gRPC server that implements the Envoy External Authorization API. You can use this version of OPA to enforce fine-grained, context-aware access control policies with Envoy without modifying your microservice.
How does it work?
In addition to the Envoy sidecar, your application pods will include an OPA sidecar. When Envoy receives API requests destined for your microservice, it checks with OPA to decide if the request should be allowed.
Evaluating policies locally with Envoy is preferable because it avoids introducing a network hop (which has implications on performance and availability) in order to perform the authorization check.
The example below shows how to run OPA-Envoy in a Kubernetes environment. OPA-Envoy can be deployed outside of Kubernetes as well. For example, it can be co-located next to a running Envoy using
docker-compose
.
Quick Start
This section assumes you are testing with Envoy v1.10.0 or later.
-
Start Minikube.
minikube start
-
Install OPA-Envoy.
kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/open-policy-agent/opa-envoy-plugin/master/quick_start.yaml
The
quick_start.yaml
manifest defines the following resources:-
A ConfigMap containing an Envoy configuration with an External Authorization Filter to direct authorization checks to the OPA-Envoy sidecar. See
kubectl get configmap proxy-config
for details. -
OPA configuration file, and an OPA policy into ConfigMaps in the namespace where the app will be deployed, e.g.,
default
. -
A Deployment consisting an example Go application with OPA-Envoy and Envoy sidecars. The sample app provides information about employees in a company and exposes APIs to
get
andcreate
employees. More information about the app can be found here. The deployment also includes an init container that installs iptables rules to redirect all container traffic through the Envoy proxy sidecar. More information can be found here.
-
-
Make the application accessible outside the cluster.
kubectl expose deployment example-app --type=NodePort --name=example-app-service --port=8080
-
Set the
SERVICE_URL
environment variable to the service’s IP/port.minikube:
export SERVICE_PORT=$(kubectl get service example-app-service -o jsonpath='{.spec.ports[?(@.port==8080)].nodePort}') export SERVICE_HOST=$(minikube ip) export SERVICE_URL=$SERVICE_HOST:$SERVICE_PORT echo $SERVICE_URL
minikube (example):
192.168.99.100:31380
-
Exercise the sample OPA policy.
For convenience, we’ll want to store Alice’s and Bob’s tokens in environment variables.
export ALICE_TOKEN="eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJyb2xlIjoiZ3Vlc3QiLCJzdWIiOiJZV3hwWTJVPSIsIm5iZiI6MTUxNDg1MTEzOSwiZXhwIjoxNjQxMDgxNTM5fQ.K5DnnbbIOspRbpCr2IKXE9cPVatGOCBrBQobQmBmaeU" export BOB_TOKEN="eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJyb2xlIjoiYWRtaW4iLCJzdWIiOiJZbTlpIiwibmJmIjoxNTE0ODUxMTM5LCJleHAiOjE2NDEwODE1Mzl9.WCxNAveAVAdRCmkpIObOTaSd0AJRECY2Ch2Qdic3kU8"
Check that
Alice
can get employees but cannot create one.curl -i -H "Authorization: Bearer "$ALICE_TOKEN"" http://$SERVICE_URL/people curl -i -H "Authorization: Bearer "$ALICE_TOKEN"" -d '{"firstname":"Charlie", "lastname":"OPA"}' -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST http://$SERVICE_URL/people
Check that
Bob
can get employees and also create one.curl -i -H "Authorization: Bearer "$BOB_TOKEN"" http://$SERVICE_URL/people curl -i -H "Authorization: Bearer "$BOB_TOKEN"" -d '{"firstname":"Charlie", "lastname":"Opa"}' -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST http://$SERVICE_URL/people
Check that
Bob
cannot create an employee with the same firstname as himself.curl -i -H "Authorization: Bearer "$BOB_TOKEN"" -d '{"firstname":"Bob", "lastname":"Rego"}' -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST http://$SERVICE_URL/people
Configuration
To deploy OPA-Envoy include the following container in your Kubernetes Deployments:
containers:
- image: openpolicyagent/opa:0.24.0-envoy
imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
name: opa-envoy
volumeMounts:
- mountPath: /config
name: opa-envoy-config
args:
- run
- --server
- --addr=localhost:8181
- --diagnostic-addr=0.0.0.0:8282
- --config-file=/config/config.yaml
livenessProbe:
httpGet:
path: /health?plugins
port: 8282
readinessProbe:
httpGet:
path: /health?plugins
port: 8282
The OPA-Envoy configuration file should be volume mounted into the container. Add the following volume to your Kubernetes Deployments:
volumes:
- name: opa-envoy-config
configMap:
name: opa-envoy-config
The OPA-Envoy plugin supports the following configuration fields:
Field | Required | Description |
---|---|---|
plugins["envoy_ext_authz_grpc"].addr |
No | Set listening address of Envoy External Authorization gRPC server. This must match the value configured in the Envoy config. Default: :9191 . |
plugins["envoy_ext_authz_grpc"].path |
No | Specifies the hierarchical policy decision path. The policy decision can either be a boolean or an object . If boolean, true indicates the request should be allowed and false indicates the request should be denied. If the policy decision is an object, it must contain the allowed key set to either true or false to indicate if the request is allowed or not respectively. It can optionally contain a headers field to send custom headers to the downstream client or upstream. An optional body field can be included in the policy decision to send a response body data to the downstream client. Also an optional http_status field can be included to send a HTTP response status code to the downstream client other than 403 (Forbidden) . Default: envoy/authz/allow . |
plugins["envoy_ext_authz_grpc"].dry-run |
No | Configures the Envoy External Authorization gRPC server to unconditionally return an ext_authz.CheckResponse.Status of google_rpc.Status{Code: google_rpc.OK} . Default: false . |
plugins["envoy_ext_authz_grpc"].enable-reflection |
No | Enables gRPC server reflection on the Envoy External Authorization gRPC server. Default: false . |
If the configuration does not specify the path
field, envoy/authz/allow
will be considered as the default policy
decision path. data.envoy.authz.allow
will be the name of the policy decision to query in the default case.
The dry-run
parameter is provided to enable you to test out new policies. You can set dry-run: true
which will
unconditionally allow requests. Decision logs can be monitored to see what "would" have happened. This is especially
useful for initial integration of OPA or when policies undergo large refactoring.
The enable-reflection
parameter registers the Envoy External Authorization gRPC server with reflection. After enabling
server reflection, a command line tool such as grpcurl can be used to invoke
RPC methods on the gRPC server. See gRPC Server Reflection Usage section for more details.
An example of a rule that returns an object that not only indicates if a request is allowed or not but also provides optional response headers, body and HTTP status that can be sent to the downstream client or upstream can be seen below in the Example Policy with Object Response section.
Example Bundle Configuration
In the Quick Start section an OPA policy is loaded via a volume-mounted ConfigMap. For production deployments, we recommend serving policy Bundles from a remote HTTP server.
Using the configuration shown below, OPA will download a sample bundle from https://www.openpolicyagent.org. The sample bundle contains the exact same policy that was loaded into OPA via the volume-mounted ConfigMap. More details about this policy can be found in the Example Policy section.
config.yaml:
services:
- name: controller
url: https://www.openpolicyagent.org
bundles:
envoy/authz:
service: controller
plugins:
envoy_ext_authz_grpc:
addr: :9191
path: envoy/authz/allow
dry-run: false
enable-reflection: false
You can download the bundle and inspect it yourself:
mkdir example && cd example
curl -s -L https://www.openpolicyagent.org/bundles/envoy/authz | tar xzv
In this way OPA can periodically download bundles of policy from an external server and hence loading the policy via a
volume-mounted ConfigMap would not be required. The readinessProbe
to GET /health?bundles
ensures that the opa-envoy
container becomes ready after the bundles are activated.
Example Policy
The following OPA policy is used in the Quick Start section above. This policy restricts access to the
/people
endpoint exposed by our sample app:
- alice is granted a guest role and can perform a
GET
request to/people
. - bob is granted an admin role and can perform a
GET
andPOST
request to /people.
The policy also restricts an admin
user, in this case bob
from creating an employee with the same firstname
as himself.
The policy uses the io.jwt.decode_verify
builtin function to parse and verify the JWT containing information
about the user making the request.
package envoy.authz
import input.attributes.request.http as http_request
default allow = false
token = {"valid": valid, "payload": payload} {
[_, encoded] := split(http_request.headers.authorization, " ")
[valid, _, payload] := io.jwt.decode_verify(encoded, {"secret": "secret"})
}
allow {
is_token_valid
action_allowed
}
is_token_valid {
token.valid
now := time.now_ns() / 1000000000
token.payload.nbf <= now
now < token.payload.exp
}
action_allowed {
http_request.method == "GET"
token.payload.role == "guest"
glob.match("/people*", [], http_request.path)
}
action_allowed {
http_request.method == "GET"
token.payload.role == "admin"
glob.match("/people*", [], http_request.path)
}
action_allowed {
http_request.method == "POST"
token.payload.role == "admin"
glob.match("/people", [], http_request.path)
lower(input.parsed_body.firstname) != base64url.decode(token.payload.sub)
}
Example Input
The input
value defined for your policy will resemble the JSON below:
{
"attributes":{
"source":{
"address":{
"Address":{
"SocketAddress":{
"PortSpecifier":{
"PortValue":61402
},
"address":"172.17.0.1"
}
}
}
},
"destination":{
"address":{
"Address":{
"SocketAddress":{
"PortSpecifier":{
"PortValue":8000
},
"address":"172.17.0.6"
}
}
}
},
"request":{
"http":{
"id":"13519049518330544501",
"method":"POST",
"headers":{
":authority":"192.168.99.206:30164",
":method":"POST",
":path":"/people?lang=en",
"accept":"*/*",
"authorization":"Bearer eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJyb2xlIjoiYWRtaW4iLCJzdWIiOiJZbTlpIiwibmJmIjoxNTE0ODUxMTM5LCJleHAiOjE2NDEwODE1Mzl9.WCxNAveAVAdRCmkpIObOTaSd0AJRECY2Ch2Qdic3kU8",
"content-length":"41",
"content-type":"application/json",
"user-agent":"curl/7.54.0",
"x-forwarded-proto":"http",
"x-request-id":"7bca5c86-bf55-432c-b212-8c0f1dc999ec"
},
"host":"192.168.99.206:30164",
"path":"/people?lang=en",
"protocol":"HTTP/1.1",
"body":"{\"firstname\":\"Charlie\", \"lastname\":\"Opa\"}",
"size":41
}
}
},
"parsed_body":{"firstname": "Charlie", "lastname": "Opa"},
"parsed_path":["people"],
"parsed_query": {"lang": ["en"]},
"truncated_body": false
}
The parsed_path
field in the input is generated from the path
field in the HTTP request which is included in the
Envoy External Authorization CheckRequest
message type. This field provides the request path as a string array which
can help policy authors perform pattern matching on the HTTP request path. The below sample policy allows anyone to
access the path /people
.
package envoy.authz
default allow = false
allow {
input.parsed_path = ["people"]
}
The parsed_query
field in the input is also generated from the path
field in the HTTP request. This field provides
the HTTP url query as a map of string array. The below sample policy allows anyone to access the path
/people?lang=en&id=1&id=2
.
package envoy.authz
default allow = false
allow {
input.parsed_path = ["people"]
input.parsed_query.lang = ["en"]
input.parsed_query.id = ["1", "2"]
}
The parsed_body
field in the input is generated from the body
field in the HTTP request which is included in the
Envoy External Authorization CheckRequest
message type. This field contains the deserialized JSON request body which
can then be used in a policy as shown below.
package envoy.authz
default allow = false
allow {
input.parsed_body.firstname == "Charlie"
input.parsed_body.lastname == "Opa"
}
The truncated_body
field in the input represents if the HTTP request body is truncated. The body is considered to be
truncated, if the value of the Content-Length
header exceeds the size of the request body.
Example Policy with Object Response
The allow
rule in the below policy when queried generates an object
that provides the status of the request
(ie. allowed
or denied
) along with some headers, body data and HTTP status which will be included in the response
that is sent back to the downstream client or upstream.
package envoy.authz
default allow = {
"allowed": false,
"headers": {"x-ext-auth-allow": "no"},
"body": "Unauthorized Request",
"http_status": 301
}
allow = response {
input.attributes.request.http.method == "GET"
response := {
"allowed": true,
"headers": {"x-ext-auth-allow": "yes"}
}
}
Example with JWT payload passed from Envoy
Envoy can be configured to pass validated JWT payload data into the ext_authz
filter with metadata_context_namespaces
and payload_in_metadata
.
Example Envoy Configuration
http_filters:
- name: envoy.filters.http.jwt_authn
typed_config:
"@type": type.googleapis.com/envoy.config.filter.http.jwt_authn.v2alpha.JwtAuthentication
providers:
example:
payload_in_metadata: verified_jwt
<...>
- name: envoy.ext_authz
config:
metadata_context_namespaces:
- envoy.filters.http.jwt_authn
<...>
Example OPA Input
This will result in something like the following dictionary being added to input.attributes
(some common fields have
been excluded for brevity):
"metadata_context": {
"filter_metadata": {
"envoy.filters.http.jwt_authn": {
"fields": {
"verified_jwt": {
"Kind": {
"StructValue": {
"fields": {
"email": {
"Kind": {
"StringValue": "alice@example.com"
}
},
"exp": {
"Kind": {
"NumberValue": 1569026124
}
},
"name": {
"Kind": {
"StringValue": "Alice"
}
}
}
}
}
}
}
}
}
}
Example OPA Policy
This JWT data can be accessed in OPA policy like this:
jwt_payload = _value {
verified_jwt := input.attributes.metadata_context.filter_metadata["envoy.filters.http.jwt_authn"]["fields"]["verified_jwt"]
_value := {
"name": verified_jwt["Kind"]["StructValue"]["fields"]["name"]["Kind"]["StringValue"],
"email": verified_jwt["Kind"]["StructValue"]["fields"]["email"]["Kind"]["StringValue"]
}
}
allow {
jwt_payload.email == "alice@example.com"
}
gRPC Server Reflection Usage
This section provides examples of interacting with the Envoy External Authorization gRPC server using the grpcurl
tool.
-
List all services exposed by the server
$ grpcurl -plaintext localhost:9191 list
Output:
envoy.service.auth.v2.Authorization grpc.reflection.v1alpha.ServerReflection
-
Invoke RPC on the server
$ grpcurl -plaintext -import-path ./proto/ -proto ./proto/envoy/service/auth/v2/external_auth.proto -d ' { "attributes": { "request": { "http": { "method": "GET", "path": "/api/v1/products" } } } }' localhost:9191 envoy.service.auth.v2.Authorization/Check
Output:
{ "status": { "code": 0 }, "okResponse": { "headers": [ { "header": { "key": "x-ext-auth-allow", "value": "yes" } } ] } }
The -proto
and -import-path
flags tell grpcurl
the relevant proto source file and the folder from which
dependencies can be imported respectively. These flags need to be provided as the Envoy External Authorization gRPC
server does not support reflection. See this issue for details.
Dependencies
Dependencies are managed with Modules.
If you need to add or update dependencies, modify the go.mod
file or
use go get
. More information is available here.
Finally commit all changes to the repository.