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Comment by neo2006 | Hacker News Reader

neo2006

Hey, we're the spinning-factory team, the folks behind Kloak. Kloak runs as a Kubernetes controller. It swaps the secrets in your workloads for harmless placeholders we call kloaked secrets, then uses eBPF to substitute the real secrets back in at the last moment — right when your app makes a request to an allowed host. Today, Kloak works with any app using OpenSSL 3.0–3.5 (statically or dynamically linked) or go-tls (Go 1.25 and 1.26). Support for more TLS libraries (GnuTLS, BoringSSL, and others) and additional Go versions is on the roadmap. Kloak is open source under the AGPL, contributions are welcome! We are also happy to hear any feedback and answer any question for the HN community.

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This is fantastic! I need this. however, for my self-hosted home projects that are containerized but where I don't use Kubernetes, is there a way for me to use a version of Kloak that does the same eBPF magic on docker-compose or LXC/QEMU (Incus) stacks?

It's perfectly fine for you to say non-Kubernetes isn't either your focus or on your 90 day roadmap :)

Thank you! We appreciate your enthusiasm! :-) From technology perspective nothing prevent kloak to do rewrite on any workload scheduler or even without a scheduler (native Linux). The main challenge is to find a flow to signal to kloak what to rewrite and how to inject kloaked secrets to the workload. TBH supporting other technologies is not something we thought about but we can definitely consider if there is an ask for it from the community.

Yes, please! :)

> The main challenge is to find a flow to signal to kloak what to rewrite and how to inject kloaked secrets to the workload

Would it be realistic or reasonable to detect a header like `X-kloak-ENABLED` or specific endpoints in the case of HTTP?

Similar for wire protocols like PostgreSQL or gRPC?

Our would a usermode proxy be easier but not preferred due to overhead?

The way we thought about it is from the lense of 2 personas: - a persona that control the control plain side, what secret to distribute to which user and what hosts they are allowed to send that secret to (probably platform team or secops team) - a persona that represent the user that need to reach host X with secret Y (probably the dev team)

based on this secret rewrite signal need to be out of band and not part of the request it self or the whole model will fall apart.

We already have the intention to support rewrites for specific headers but those headers are defined by the first persona out of band too.

btw, we support rewrite for postgres protocol for db password.

Yeah you might have to go talk to incus folks on how to integrate this together.. They are fairly capable, might have some good direction.

https://discuss.linuxcontainers.org/t/how-to-best-ask-questi...

Thank you! We will reachout and see what can be done

Please let me know how I can help. Can I write or review the initial forum post for you or anything that can help both of us?

- What's the best way to discuss this specific topic with you? As an https://github.com/spinningfactory/kloak/issues or something else?

- My specific usecase is to not need Conjur Secretless Broker (https://github.com/cyberark/secretless-broker) - my understanding of eBPF is entirely superficial but from a 30k ft view, it looks like this can not only replace it but would be a far efficient solution (Conjur would be a user-space proxy while kloak would be at lower levels of abstraction)?

yes please open an issue on https://github.com/spinningfactory/kloak/issues and we can discuss this. I'm not familiar with secretless-broker but we can definitely see if that use case fit with kloak and get into more specifics on how you can help.

your architecture page is empty. https://getkloak.io/docs/architecture/overview.html

For security products trust is important. writing your website copy by hand will help you build trust. If the design and content does not look human written it will lower adoption.

Thank you for the feedback! We are currently shorthanded so we relied on AI a lot for writing our docs, we reviewed that doc as much as we could but definitely there is room for improvement. We will try to get better at this. In the mean time, if you find any discruptency with the docs or anything that we can correct please open an issue and we will get to it ASAP.

So it reads the packets and replaces the byte sequences at the kernel level? How does that work across packet boundaries?

Secrets are detected before encryption in the user buffer but rewrites happen post encryption in the kernel buffer to be sent on the wire.

packets boundaries are not an issue because detection happen at the SSL write where we have the full secret in the buffer and its position so we can know at rewrite time that the secret is cross 2 packets and rewrite it in 2 separate operations. We also have to update the TLS session hash at the end to not corrupt the TLS frame.

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