This charm delivers the EasyRSA application to act as a Certificate Authority (CA) and creates certificates for related charms.

EasyRSA is a command line utility to build and manage Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) Certificate Authority (CA).

The purpose of a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is to facilitate the secure electronic transfer of information.

You can deploy an EasyRSA charm with Juju:

juju deploy easyrsa
juju deploy tls-client
juju add-relation easyrsa tls-client

The easyrsa charm will become a Certificate Authority (CA) and generate a CA certificate. Other charms need only to relate to easyrsa with a requires using the tls-certificates interface.

To get a server certificate from easyrsa, the charm must include the interface:tls-certificates interface in the layer.yaml file. The charm must also require the tls interface, in the metadata.yaml. The relation name may be named what ever you wish, assume the relation is named "certificates" for these examples.

The interface will generate a CA certificate immediately. If another charm requires a CA certificate the code must react to the flag certificates.ca.available. The relationship object has a method named get_ca which returns the CA certificate.

@when('certificates.ca.available')
def store_ca(tls):
    '''Read the certificate authority from the relation object and install it
    on this system.'''
    # Get the CA from the relationship object.
    ca_cert = tls.get_ca()
    write_file('/usr/local/share/ca-certificates/easyrsa.crt', ca_cert)

The easyrsa charm generates a client certificate after the CA certificate is created. If another charm needs the CA the code must react to the flag certificates.client.cert.available. The relationship object has a method that returns the client cert and client key called get_client_cert.

@when('certificates.client.cert.available')
def store_client(tls):
    '''Read the client certificate from the relation object and install it on
    this system.'''
    client_cert, client_key = tls.get_client_cert()
    write_file('/home/ubuntu/client.crt', client_cert)
    write_file('/home/ubuntu/client.key', client_key)

The interface will set certificates.available flag on a relation. The reactive code should send three values on the relation to request a certificate. Call the request_server_cert method on the relationship object. The three values are: Common Name (CN), a list of Subject Alt Names (SANs), and the file name of the certificate (the unit name with the '/' replaced with an underscore). For example a client charm would send:

@when('certificates.available')
def send_data(tls):
    # Use the public ip of this unit as the Common Name for the certificate.
    common_name = hookenv.unit_public_ip()
    # Get a list of Subject Alt Names for the certificate.
    sans = []
    sans.append(hookenv.unit_public_ip())
    sans.append(hookenv.unit_private_ip())
    sans.append(socket.gethostname())
    # Create a path safe name by removing path characters from the unit name.
    certificate_name = hookenv.local_unit().replace('/', '_')
    # Send the information on the relation object.
    tls.request_server_cert(common_name, sans, certificate_name)

The easyrsa charm generates the server certificate and key after the request have been made. If another charm needs the server certificate the code must react to the flag {relation_name}.server.cert.available. The relationship object has a method that returns the server cert and server key called get_server_cert.

@when('certificates.server.cert.available')
def store_server(tls):
    '''Read the server certificate from the relation object and install it on
    this system.'''
    server_cert, server_key = tls.get_server_cert()
    write_file('/home/ubuntu/server.cert', server_cert)
    write_file('/home/ubuntu/server.key', server_key)

• Author: Matthew Bruzek <Matthew.Bruzek@canonical.com>
• Contributor: Cory Johns <Cory.Johns@canonical.com>