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TLS: Transport Layer Security

Transport Layer Security (TLS) is a cryptographic protocol that secures communication over a network. TLS is the successor to deprecated Secure-Sockets-Layer (SSL). Learn how to configure Spice to use TLS for encryption in transit.

Pre-requisites​

A valid TLS certificate and private key in PEM format are required. To generate certificates for testing, follow the TLS Sample.

Enable TLS via command line arguments​

Use --tls-enabled true to enable TLS from the command line. The arguments --tls-certificate-file and --tls-key-file specify the paths to the certificate and private key files.

# Provide the TLS certicate and key PEM files to the Spice runtime
spiced --tls-enabled true --tls-certificate-file /path/to/cert.pem --tls-key-file /path/to/key.pem

Alternatively, to pass PEM-encoded certificate and private key strings directly, use the --tls-certificate and --tls-key arguments.

# Provide the TLS certicate and key using PEM-encoded strings to the Spice runtime
export TLS_CERT=$(cat /path/to/cert.pem)
export TLS_KEY=$(cat /path/to/key.pem)
spiced --tls-enabled true --tls-certificate "$TLS_CERT" --tls-key "$TLS_KEY"

When using the Spice CLI, arguments, including the TLS arguments, are passed to spice run automatically.

# Run Spice using the CLI and provide the TLS certicate and key as PEM files
spice run -- --tls-enabled true --tls-certificate-file /path/to/cert.pem --tls-key-file /path/to/key.pem

Note that -- is used to separate the spice run arguments from the Spice runtime arguments.

Enable TLS via spicepod.yaml​

Use the tls section as a child to runtime to provide the certificate and key files/strings.

runtime:
  tls:
    enabled: true
    # Using filesystem paths
    certificate_file: /path/to/cert.pem
    key_file: /path/to/key.pem
runtime:
  tls:
    enabled: true
    # Specify the certificate and key directly
    certificate: |
      -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
      ...
      -----END CERTIFICATE-----
    key: |
      -----BEGIN PRIVATE KEY-----
      ...
      -----END PRIVATE KEY-----
runtime:
  tls:
    enabled: true
    # Provide the certificate and key using secrets
    certificate: ${secrets:tls_cert}
    key: ${secrets:tls_key}

To learn more about secrets, see Secret Stores.

info

Changes to TLS configuration are not applied at runtime and will only take effect on startup.

Output​

When TLS is enabled, the runtime output will print the TLS certificate details.

INFO runtime: All endpoints secured with TLS using certificate: CN=spiced.localhost, OU=IT, O=Widgets, Inc., L=Seattle, S=Washington, C=US

Using the Spice CLI​

When TLS is enabled in the runtime, the Spice CLI can be configured to connect to the runtime using TLS by specifying the --tls-root-certificate-file argument, providing the path to the root certificate file.

spice sql --tls-root-certificate-file /path/to/root.pem