Blog

Client Certificate Authentication and Ingress improvements in Contour 1.4

Nick Young

Apr 27, 2020

Our latest release of Contour is 1.4, which includes support for Client Certificate authentication in your HTTPProxy objects, and also updates Contour’s Ingress support to fix some missing or incorrect behaviors. In addition Contour 1.4 upgrades Envoy to 1.14.1, to keep up with Envoy’s current supported version.

TLS Client authentication

This release adds support for client authentication through the use of certificates.

So what does this mean? Well, you can now configure your HTTPProxy routes so that they require a client certificate supplied by your client (usually your browser), which allows you to use that client certificate for authentication.

To use this feature, add the new clientValidation field to the tls stanza of your HTTPProxy document:

apiVersion: projectcontour.io/v1
kind: HTTPProxy
metadata:
  name: with-client-auth
spec:
  virtualhost:
    fqdn: www.example.com
    tls:
      secretName: secret
      clientValidation:                  
        caSecret: client-root-ca
  routes:
    - services:
        - name: s1
          port: 80

The caSecret field is a reference to a Kubernetes Secret that holds the CA certificate used to validate the client certificate. The Secret must contain a ca.crt key that holds a PEM-encoded bundle of the full trust chain for any CA used to validate certificates.

It’s important to note that this only provides authentication, not authorization. To put this another way, Contour and Envoy can only give you a guarantee that the supplied person is the bearer of a valid certificate, not they are allowed to do something.

Thanks very much to @tsaarni for getting this implemented!

Ingress changes

Ingress class

Before this release of Contour, when configured to accept a certain ingress.class annotation, Contour would watch objects with that annotation and also with no annotation. This caused problems in clusters with more than one ingress controller.

Starting with Contour 1.4, having an ingress.class annotation configured means that only objects that have a matching annotation will cause changes in Contour.

Note that this logic change applies to both Ingress and HTTPProxy objects.

If you don’t give Contour an ingress.class on its command line, then Contour will look at all objects with no ingress.class, and objects with an ingress.class of contour. This preserves the old behavior so that we don’t break you if that’s what you expect.

Ingress Status

Contour now has the ability to write a status.loadBalancer.addresses block to Ingress objects. This block is used by services which need to know how to reach an Ingress' backing service from outside the cluster, like external-dns.

There are two ways for Contour to find this information:

• by watching a Service object for the Envoy service, and putting the associated status.loadBalancer block from that Service into all associated Ingress objects. This is what is used in the example deployment.
• Operators can also specify an address on Contour’s command line, using the --ingress-status-address flag. The address that’s passed on the command line will be passed straight through to the Ingress status.

This also means that when you kubectl get a Contour-owned Ingress, instead of this:

$ kubectl get ingress httpbin
NAME      HOSTS                   ADDRESS   PORTS     AGE
httpbin   httpbin.youngnick.dev             80, 443   336d

you will see this:

$ kubectl get ingress httpbin
NAME      HOSTS                   ADDRESS   PORTS     AGE
httpbin   httpbin.youngnick.dev   x.x.x.x   80, 443   336d

Removed the --use-extensions-v1beta1-ingress flag

The --use-extensions-v1beta1-ingress flag was removed from the contour serve command in Contour 1.3. If you have a previous deployment that specifies this command, you must remove it or Contour will fail to start.

Future Plans

The Contour project is very community-driven and the team would love to hear your feedback!

• Come talk about topics at our next community meeting.
• We’ve heard that a number of teams have forked Contour and we would love to hear about what changes you needed, and to see if we can help to bring them upstream. Please consider coming to our community meeting, or contact us: either via an issue, or hit me up on Twitter @youngnick.

If you are interested in contributing, a great place to start is to comment on one of the issues labeled with Help Wanted and work with the team on how to resolve them.

Are you a Contour user? We would love to know!

If you’re using Contour and want to add your organization to our adopters list, please visit this page. If you prefer to keep your organization name anonymous but still give us feedback into your usage and scenarios for Contour, please post on this GitHub thread

Thanks to our contributors

We’re immensely grateful for all the community contributions that help make Contour even better! Special thanks go out to:

• Tero Saarni ( @tsaarni)
• Peter Grant ( @pickledrick)