V10.0 and later
Prerequisites
- Basic understanding of Cora Orchestration configuration.
- Basic understanding of the external secret stores, AWS Secrets Manager, or Azure Key Vault, whichever you want to use.
- Knowledge of creating secret keys in the secret stores.
Overview
Cora Orchestration supports external secret stores to store and fetch values like user credentials, connection strings, database credentials, API keys, OAuth tokens, and other secrets for the configuration files at runtime. With this functionality you need not hardcode the sensitive information in plain text or encrypted text. With secret stores you can also control the permission-based access to the sensitive information.
Following are the three secret stores supported:
- AWS Secrets Manager
- Azure Key Vault
- System Environment Variables
Starting from V10.1, to choose a specific secret store for Cora Orchestration, and connect to the secret store, you need to run the Add-CoraOrchestrationSecretEnvironmentVariables PowerShell function.
For V10.0, configuring the secret store is done manually.
To choose the specific secret store, you need to add the sequence:secrets:providerTypes environment variable in your system environment variables, and to connect to the secret store, you need to configure the store specific environment variables in the system.
All the store specific environment variables are listed in the sections below.
For the list of secret keys required for Cora Orchestration, see the Secret keys section below.
NOTE
While upgrading from versions previous to V10.0, make sure to include the following secrets to the configs:
For System Environment Variables store:
- Genpact.CoraSeQuence.Rijndael.Key
- Genpact.CoraSeQuence.Rijndael.Salt
For Azure Key Vault store:
- Genpact0CoraSeQuence0Rijndael0Key (with same value as Genpact.CoraSeQuence.Rijndael.Key)
AWS Secrets Manager environment variables
| Environment variable | Description |
|---|---|
| sequence:secrets:providerTypes | The secret store type Value: AWSSecretManager |
| sequence:secrets:awsAccessKey | The access key |
| sequence:secrets:awsSecretKey | The secret key |
| sequence:secrets:awsRegion | The region for which secret store is being set |
| sequence:secrets:awsUseSecretNameAsKeyPrefix (Optional) | When True, will generate keys with secret name as prefix: "secretName:secretKey". When False, will generate keys without secret name as prefix: "secretKey". |
| sequence:secrets:awsKeyPrefixFilter (Optional) | The prefix that all keys must include. |
| sequence:secrets:awsAcceptedSecretArns (Optional) | The list of identifiers for the secrets that are to be retrieved. The secret ARN (full or partial) and secret name are supported. For example: MySecretFullARN-abcxyz;MySecretPartialARN;MySecretUniqueName |
| sequence:secrets:awsPollingInterval (Optional) | The waiting time before refreshing the secrets. If null, secrets will not be refreshed. For example, 00:15:00 for 15 minutes. |
| sequence:secrets:awsSecretNamesFilter (Optional) | The list of secret names that get passed to the client to filter the listed secrets before returning them. For example, secret1;secret2 |
Azure Key Vault environment variables
| Environment variable | Description |
|---|---|
| sequence:secrets:providerTypes | The secret store type Value: AzureKeyVault |
| sequence:secrets:azureKeyVaultUri | The Azure Uniform Resource Identifier of the key vault. |
| sequence:secrets:azureKeyVaultTenantId | The ID of the tenant (directory) where the AD application is registered. |
| sequence:secrets:azureKeyVaultClientId | The ID of the application (client) that you created to read the secrets. |
| sequence:secrets:azureKeyVaultClientSecret | The secret for the Azure Active Directory application. |
| sequence:secrets:azureKeyVaultSecretKeyPrefix (Optional) | The prefix for the names of the secrets in the vault. |
System environment variables
If you don't want to use an external secret store, you can use your system environment variables to store secrets.
| Environment variable | Value/Description |
|---|---|
| sequence:secrets:providerTypes | The secret store type. Value: EnvironmentVariables |
| sequence:services:executionType (From V10.4 onwards) | The execution type to execute ADD, BRS, and JES as Console Application under Docker in Kubernetes environments or Windows Service under Virtual Machine (VM) environments. Value:
|
Secret keys
The following are the secret keys and their values you need to store in your secret store.
| Secret key | Description | Value |
|---|---|---|
| sequence:persistence:database:provider | Database provider name | Microsoft.Data.SqlClient |
| sequence:persistence:database:credentials | Database credentials | user id=sa;password=sa; |
| sequence:persistence:database:connectionString | Database connection string | For example, MultipleActiveResultSets=true;initial catalog=DBName;persist security info=True;data source=DBserverName;packet size=4096; |
| sequence:messageBus:connections:defaultConnectionName | Connection name for the Default type message bus activity set for communication infra for the activity. | Any label that is defined as “name” in the section <messageBus> <connections>.
|
| sequence:messageBus:connections:notificationsConnectionName (From V10.5 onwards) | Connection name for the Notifications type message bus activity set for communication between Cora applications. | |
| sequence:messageBus:connections:redundancyConnectionName (From V10.5 onwards) | Connection name for the Redundancy type message bus activity set for communication between JES applications. | |
| sequence:messageBus:connections:azureServiceBus:connectionString (From V10.5 onwards) | Azure Service Bus connection string, if you have set AzureServiceBus as default message bus connection name. | Endpoint=sb://xxxx.windows.net/; SharedAccessKeyName=RootManageSharedAccessKey; SharedAccessKey=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx |
| sequence:messageBus:connections:activeMQ:credentials | ActiveMQ credentials, if you have added ActiveMQ as default message bus connection name | user id=mb1;password=sd; |
| sequence:messageBus:connections:activeMQ:connectionString | ActiveMQ connection string, if you have added ActiveMQ as default message bus connection name | For example, Server=failover:(tcp://192.168.xx.x:00000);Username=usr1;Password=pswd1; |
| sequence:cryptography:sha256:salt | The sha256 salt to prevent identical passwords NOTE When you upgrade, this value should not be changed. | Base64string |
| sequence:cryptography:rijndael:key (Obsolete from V10.4 onwards) | The Rijndael key. NOTE When you upgrade, this value should not change. | Base64string |
| sequence:cryptography:rijndael:salt (Obsolete from V10.4 onwards) | The Rijndael salt to prevent identical passwords. NOTE When you upgrade, this value should not change. | Base64string |
| sequence:cryptography:aes:key (From V10.4 onwards) | The AES key. NOTE When you upgrade, this value should not change. | Base64string |
| sequence:cryptography:aes:salt (From V10.4 onwards) | The AES salt to prevent identical passwords. NOTE When you upgrade, this value should not change. | Base64string |
Since the Rijndael is obsolete from .NET6 onwards, we have upgraded to use AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) algorithm for enhanced security. Cora Orchestration V10.4 onwards uses AES ECB mode for encryptions.
For details, see this article.
For Azure Key Vault, once the secrets are created and finalized, you need to alter the existing legacy credentials and connections strings created before V10.0 to use the new key with the following SQL:
For credentials:
update tblCredentials set fldPassword = REPLACE(fldPassword,'bnBhY3QuQ29yYVNlUXVlbmNlLlJpam5kYWVsLktle','bnBhY3QwQ29yYVNlUXVlbmNlMFJpam5kYWVsMEtle'), fldCredentialString = REPLACE(fldCredentialString,'bnBhY3QuQ29yYVNlUXVlbmNlLlJpam5kYWVsLktle','bnBhY3QwQ29yYVNlUXVlbmNlMFJpam5kYWVsMEtle') where fldName='SMTP'
For connection strings:
update tblConnectionString set fldConnectionString =REPLACE(fldConnectionString,'bnBhY3QuQ29yYVNlUXVlbmNlLlJpam5kYWVsLktle','bnBhY3QwQ29yYVNlUXVlbmNlMFJpam5kYWVsMEtle') where fldName='ConnectionString Name'
NOTE
You can update the where clause based on your needs.
