RabbitMQ secrets engine

The RabbitMQ secrets engine generates user credentials dynamically based on configured permissions and virtual hosts. This means that services that need to access a virtual host no longer need to hardcode credentials.

With every service accessing the messaging queue with unique credentials, auditing is much easier when questionable data access is discovered. Easily track issues down to a specific instance of a service based on the RabbitMQ username.

Vault makes use both of its own internal revocation system as well as the deleting RabbitMQ users when creating RabbitMQ users to ensure that users become invalid within a reasonable time of the lease expiring.

Setup

Most secrets engines must be configured in advance before they can perform their functions. These steps are usually completed by an operator or configuration management tool.

1. Enable the RabbitMQ secrets engine:

   $ vault secrets enable rabbitmq
   Success! Enabled the rabbitmq secrets engine at: rabbitmq/
   

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   By default, the secrets engine will mount at the name of the engine. To enable the secrets engine at a different path, use the -path argument.

2. Configure the credentials that Vault uses to communicate with RabbitMQ to generate credentials:

   $ vault write rabbitmq/config/connection \
       connection_uri="http://localhost:15672" \
       username="admin" \
       password="password"
   Success! Data written to: rabbitmq/config/connection
   

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   It is important that the Vault user have the administrator privilege to manager users.

3. Configure a role that maps a name in Vault to virtual host permissions:

   $ vault write rabbitmq/roles/my-role \
       vhosts='{"/":{"write": ".*", "read": ".*"}}'
   Success! Data written to: rabbitmq/roles/my-role
   

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   By writing to the roles/my-role path we are defining the my-role role. This role will be created by evaluating the given vhosts, vhost_topics and tags statements. By default, no tags, no virtual hosts or topic permissions are assigned to a role. If no topic permissions are defined and the default authorisation backend is used, publishing to a topic exchange or consuming from a topic is always authorised. You can read more about RabbitMQ management tags and RabbitMQ topic authorization.

Usage

After the secrets engine is configured and a user/machine has a Vault token with the proper permission, it can generate credentials.

1. Generate a new credential by reading from the /creds endpoint with the name of the role:

   $ vault read rabbitmq/creds/my-role
   Key                Value
   ---                -----
   lease_id           rabbitmq/creds/my-role/I39Hu8XXOombof4wiK5bKMn9
   lease_duration     768h
   lease_renewable    true
   password           3yNDBikgQvrkx2VA2zhq5IdSM7IWk1RyMYJr
   username           root-39669250-3894-8032-c420-3d58483ebfc4
   

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   Using ACLs, it is possible to restrict using the rabbitmq secrets engine such that trusted operators can manage the role definitions, and both users and applications are restricted in the credentials they are allowed to read.

API

The RabbitMQ secrets engine has a full HTTP API. Please see the RabbitMQ secrets engine API for more details.