Conjur

Conjur provides secrets management and application identity for modern infrastructure:

• Machine Authorization Markup Language ("MAML"), a role-based access policy language to define system components & their roles, privileges and metadata
• A REST web service to:
  • manage identity life cycles for humans and machines
  • organize and search roles and data in your secrets infrastructure
  • authorize access to resources using a sophisticated permission model
  • store secrets and make them available securely
• Integrations throughout the cloud toolchain:
  • infrastructure as a service (IaaS)
  • configuration management
  • continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD)
  • container management and cloud orchestration

Note: our badges and social media buttons never track you.

• Getting Started
  • Compatibility
• Community Support
• Migrating to Conjur EE
• Architecture
  • Database
    • DATABASE_URL environment variable
    • Database initialization
  • Authenticators
  • Rotators
  • Secrets and keys
    • Important: avoid data loss
  • Account management
• Versioning
• Contributing
• License

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Getting Started

Please refer to our Quick Start Guide for detailed information on using Conjur Open Source for the first time, or, refer to the Conjur docs for specific guides relating to setup, integrations, administration, and more.

Compatibility

We strongly recommend choosing the version of this project to use from the latest Conjur Open_Source suite release. Conjur maintainers perform additional testing on the suite release versions to ensure compatibility. When possible, upgrade your Conjur version to match the latest suite release; when using integrations, choose the latest suite release that matches your Conjur version.

When upgrading your Conjur server running in a Docker Compose environment to the latest suite release version, please review the upgrade instructions. For any questions, please contact us on Discourse.

Community Support

Our primary channel for support is through our CyberArk Commons community here

Migrating to Conjur EE

Migrating data from Conjur Open Source to Conjur EE is simple using our migration guide

Architecture

Conjur is designed to run in a Docker container(s), using Postgresql as the backing data store. It's easy to run both Conjur and Postgresql in Docker; see the demo directory for an example.

Database

DATABASE_URL environment variable

Conjur uses the DATABASE_URL environment variable to connect to the database. Typical options for this URL are:

• Local linked pg container
• External managed database such as AWS RDS.

Database initialization

Conjur creates and/or updates the database schema automatically when it starts up. Migration scripts are located in the db/migrate directory.

Authenticators

Conjur makes it easy to:

• Enable and disable built-in authenticators
• Secure access to authenticators using policy files
• Create custom authenticators

Detailed authenticator design documentation

Rotators

Conjur makes it easy to:

• Rotate variables regularly using built-in rotators
• Create custom rotators

Detailed rotator design documenation

Secrets and keys

Main article: Conjur Cryptography

Conjur uses industry-standard cryptography to protect your data.

Some operations require storage and management of encrypted data. For example:

• Roles can have associated API keys, which are stored encrypted in the database
• the authenticate function issues a signed JSON token; the signing key is a 2048 bit RSA key which is stored encrypted in the database

Data is encrypted in and out of the database using Slosilo, a library which provides:

• symmetric encryption using AES-256-GCM
• a Ruby class mixin for easy encryption of object attributes into the database
• asymmetric encryption and signing
• a keystore in a Postgresql database for easy storage and retrieval of keys

Slosilo has been verified by a professional cryptographic audit. Ask in our CyberArk Commons community for more details. (You can join here.)

Important: avoid data loss

When you start Conjur, you must provide a Base64-encoded master data key in the environment variable CONJUR_DATA_KEY. You can generate a data key using the following command:

$ docker run --rm conjur data-key generate

Do NOT lose the data key, or all the encrypted data will be unrecoverable.

Account management

Conjur supports the simultaneous operation of multiple separate accounts within the same database. In other words, it's multi-tenant.

Each account (also called "organization account") has its own token-signing private key. When a role is authenticated, the HMAC of the access token is computed using the signing key of the role's account.

Accounts can be listed, created, and deleted via the /accounts service. Permission to use this service is controlled by the built-in resource !:webservice:accounts. Note that ! is itself an organization account, and therefore privileges on the !:webservice:accounts can be managed via Conjur policies.

Versioning

Starting from version 0.1.0, this project follows Semantic Versioning.

Contributing

If you’re interested in running Conjur locally and learning about how it works, please see our Contributing Guide. It includes helpful instructions for Conjur development and debugging, including:

• Development prerequisites
• Building Conjur as a Docker image
• Setting up a local development environment
• Running the test suites
• Pull request workflow
• Style guide
• Changelog maintenance

If you have any questions, please open an issue or ask us on Discourse.

License

The Conjur server (as in, the code within this repository) is licensed under the Free Software Foundation's GNU LGPL v3.0. This license was chosen to ensure that all contributions to the Conjur server are made available to the community. Commercial licenses are also available from CyberArk.

The Conjur API clients and other extensions are licensed under the Apache Software License v2.0.

Copyright (c) 2020 CyberArk Software Ltd. All rights reserved.