Recommended RBAC Configuration

This page summarises the contents of the securing access to the dashboard, service account permissions and user permissions. They should be read in addition to this page in order to understand the suggestions made here and their ramifications.

This page is purposefully vague as the intention is to give a broad idea of how such a system could be implemented, not the specifics as that will be dependent on your specific circumstances and goals.

Summary

The general recommendation is to use OIDC and a small number of groups that Weave GitOps can impersonate.

OIDC is the recommended method for managing authentication as it decouples the need to manage user lists from the application, allowing it to be managed via a central system designed for that purpose (i.e. the OIDC provider). OIDC also enables the creation of groups (either via your provider's own systems or by using a connector like Dex).

Configuring Weave GitOps to impersonate kubernetes groups rather than users has the following benefits:

• A user's permissions for impersonation by Weave GitOps can be separate from any other permissions that they may or may not have within the cluster.
• Users do not have to be individually managed within the cluster and can have their permissions managed together.

Example set up

Assume that your company has the following people in OIDC

• Aisha, a cluster admin, who should have full admin access to Weave GitOps
• Brian, lead of team-A, who should have admin permissions to their team's namespace in Weave GitOps and readonly otherwise
• June and Jo, developers in team-A who should have read-only access to Weave GitOps

You could then create 3 groups:

• wego-admin
  • Bound to the ClusterRole, created by Helm, wego-admin-cluster-role
  • Aisha is the only member
• wego-team-a-admin
  • Bound to a Role, using the same permissions as wego-admin-role, created in Team's namespace
  • Brian and Aisha are members
• wego-readonly
  • Bound to a ClusterRole that matches wego-admin-cluster-role but with no patch permissions.
  • Aisha, Brian, June & Jo are all members

The Weave GitOps service account can then be configured with:

rbac:
  impersonationResourceNames: ["wego-admin", "wego-team-a-admin", "wego-readonly"]
  impersonationResources: ["groups"]

so that only these three groups can be impersonated by the service account.

Using OIDC for cluster and Weave GitOps Authentication

If the same OIDC provider is used to authenticate a user with the cluster itself (e.g. for use with kubectl) and to Weave GitOps then, depending on OIDC configuration, they may end up with the super-set of their permissions from Weave GitOps and any other permissions granted to them.

This can lead to un-intended consequences (e.g. viewing secrets). To avoid this OIDC providers will often let you configure which groups are returned to which clients: the Weave GitOps groups should not be returned to the cluster client (and vice versa).

Code

The yaml to configure these permissions would look roughly like:

Expand to see example RBAC

# Admin cluster role
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: ClusterRole
metadata:
  name: wego-admin-cluster-role
rules:
  - apiGroups: [""]
    resources: ["secrets", "pods" ]
    verbs: [ "get", "list" ]
  - apiGroups: ["apps"]
    resources: [ "deployments", "replicasets"]
    verbs: [ "get", "list" ]
  - apiGroups: ["kustomize.toolkit.fluxcd.io"]
    resources: [ "kustomizations" ]
    verbs: [ "get", "list", "patch" ]
  - apiGroups: ["helm.toolkit.fluxcd.io"]
    resources: [ "helmreleases" ]
    verbs: [ "get", "list", "patch" ]
  - apiGroups: ["source.toolkit.fluxcd.io"]
    resources: [ "buckets", "helmcharts", "gitrepositories", "helmrepositories", "ocirepositories" ]
    verbs: [ "get", "list", "patch" ]
  - apiGroups: [""]
    resources: ["events"]
    verbs: ["get", "watch", "list"]
---
# Read only cluster role
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: ClusterRole
metadata:
  name: wego-readonly-role
rules:
  # All the 'patch' permissions have been removed
  - apiGroups: [""]
    resources: ["secrets", "pods" ]
    verbs: [ "get", "list" ]
  - apiGroups: ["apps"]
    resources: [ "deployments", "replicasets"]
    verbs: [ "get", "list" ]
  - apiGroups: ["kustomize.toolkit.fluxcd.io"]
    resources: [ "kustomizations" ]
    verbs: [ "get", "list" ]
  - apiGroups: ["helm.toolkit.fluxcd.io"]
    resources: [ "helmreleases" ]
    verbs: [ "get", "list" ]
  - apiGroups: ["source.toolkit.fluxcd.io"]
    resources: [ "buckets", "helmcharts", "gitrepositories", "helmrepositories", "ocirepositories" ]
    verbs: [ "get", "list" ]
  - apiGroups: [""]
    resources: ["events"]
    verbs: ["get", "watch", "list"]
---
# Bind the cluster admin role to the wego-admin group
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: ClusterRoleBinding
metadata:
  name: wego-cluster-admin
subjects:
- kind: Group
  name: wego-admin # only Aisha is a member
  apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
roleRef:
  kind: ClusterRole
  name: wego-admin-cluster-role
  apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
---
# Bind the admin role in the team-a namespace for the wego-team-a-admin group
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: RoleBinding
metadata:
  name: wego-team-a-admin-role
  namespace: team-a
subjects:
- kind: Group
  name: wego-team-a-admin # Aisha & Brian are members
  apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
roleRef:
  # Use the cluster role to set rules, just bind them in the team-a namespace
  kind: ClusterRole
  name: wego-admin-role
  apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
---
# Bind the readonly role to the readonly group
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: ClusterRoleBinding
metadata:
  name: wego-readonly-role
subjects:
- kind: Group
  name: wego-readonly # Everyone is a member
  apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
roleRef:
  kind: ClusterRole
  name: wego-readonly-role
  apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
---