CA certificates for Application Single Sign-On

This topic tells you how to configure CA certificates for AuthServer in Application Single Sign-On (commonly called AppSSO).

An AuthServer can trust custom CAs. You can establish either for all AuthServers or for a single AuthServer. This is useful when either your identity provider or storage serves certificates from a custom CA.

In most cases, CA certificates are PEM-encoded and located in a Secret referred from .spec.caCerts[].secretRef.name. The controller considers all Secret entries matching *.(crt|ca-bundle). That means you can include multiple CA certificates in a single Secret or spread them across multiple Secrets.

After being created, an AuthServer reports the trusted, total custom CA certificates in its .status.caCerts together with the location where it sources them from. This includes the CA certificates that are trusted by all AuthServers.

For example:

---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: my-ca
  namespace: services
stringData:
  my.ca-bundle: |
    This is My Company's custom CA. It's common name is "My CA".
    -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
    ...
    -----END CERTIFICATE-----

---
apiVersion: sso.apps.tanzu.vmware.com/v1alpha1
kind: AuthServer
metadata:
  name: login
  namespace: services
  # ...
spec:
  caCerts:
    - secretRef:
        name: my-ca
  # ...
status:
  caCerts:
    - cert:
        subject: CN=My CA,O=My Company,C=Happyland
      source:
        secretEntry: service/my-ca[my.ca-bundle]
    - cert:
        subject: CN=My other CA,O=My Company,C=Happyland
      source:
        secretEntry: appsso/appsso-controller[controller.yaml]
  # ...

CA certificates configured for all AuthServers by using the package installation’s ca_cert_data are sourced from secretEntry: appsso/appsso-controller[controller.yaml]. This denotes the AppSSO controller’s configuration Secret.