sealed-secrets-controller-iamguarded-fips

Chainguard Container for sealed-secrets-controller-iamguarded-fips

A Kubernetes controller and tool for one-way encrypted Secrets, enabling safe GitOps-friendly secret management.

Chainguard Containers are regularly-updated, secure-by-default container images.

Download this Container Image

For those with access, this container image is available on cgr.dev:

docker pull cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/sealed-secrets-controller-iamguarded-fips:latest

Be sure to replace the ORGANIZATION placeholder with the name used for your organization's private repository within the Chainguard Registry.

Overview

Sealed Secrets is used to safely manage encrypted Kubernetes Secrets and is designed to run as a native Kubernetes controller. Sealed Secrets IAmGuarded FIPS is a FIPS 140-2 compliant,security-enhanced variant of Sealed Secrets designed to be deployed using its companion IAMGuarded Helm chart. This image provides the Sealed Secrets Controller component with FIPS-validated cryptography in addition to the security benefits of IAMGuarded deployments.

FIPS Compliance

This image is built with FIPS-validated cryptographic modules and uses openssl-config-fipshardened to enforce FIPS mode. The image will panic if FIPS mode cannot be initialized, ensuring compliance in regulated environments.

Helm Chart Installation

The Sealed Secrets IAMGuarded FIPS Helm chart is delivered exclusively through the same OCI registry as your Chainguard images:

cgr.dev/$ORGANIZATION/iamguarded-charts/sealed-secrets

Basic Installation

To deploy sealed secrets with the Chainguard image, create a values.yaml file with the image information - such as:

image:
  registry: cgr.dev
  repository: ORGANIZATION/sealed-secrets-controller-iamguarded-fips
  tag: latest

Then install the controller using Helm:

helm repo add sealed-secrets https://bitnami-labs.github.io/sealed-secrets
helm install sealed-secrets sealed-secrets/sealed-secrets \
  --namespace kube-system \
  --create-namespace \
  -f values.yaml

This deploys the Sealed Secrets controller in the kube-system namespace using the specified image. This is the default namespace that kubeseal tool for encrypting secrets is expected, so changing the namespace will also require providing --controller-namespace argument to kubeseal whenever encrypting a secret.

Encrypting Secrets

To encrypt a secret, use the kubectl to create a Kubernetes Secret YAML file (unless you already have it) and then use kubeseal CLI tool to encrypt it. Such as:

kubectl create secret generic \
  --namespace default mysecret \
  --dry-run=client \
  --from-literal=password=supersecret \
  -o yaml >secret.yaml

kubeseal <secret.yaml -o yaml >sealedsecret.yaml

This generates a SealedSecret that can be safely committed to version control.

Applying Sealed Secrets

Once encrypted, apply the SealedSecret to your cluster:

kubectl apply -f mysealedsecret.yaml

The controller will decrypt it and create the actual Kubernetes Secret.

Authentication

For detailed instructions on configuring authentication and pull credentials for iamguarded images, please refer to our comprehensive guide: How to Use Chainguard Helm Charts

Best Practices

1. Pin to Digest: While charts follow the same tagging scheme as Chainguard images, always pin to a specific chart digest to prevent unexpected updates:

   helm install sealed oci://cgr.dev/$ORGANIZATION/iamguarded-charts/sealed-secrets@sha256:DIGEST \
     --namespace sealed-secrets \
     --create-namespace \
     --set "global.org=$ORGANIZATION" \
     --set "global.image.repository=sealed-secrets-controller-iamguarded-fips"

2. Review Default Values: The chart provides security-minded defaults that are sensible but may not be production-ready for all use cases. Review the chart's values.yaml (run helm show values) for the full range of configuration options.

3. Image Pinning: All IAMGuarded charts pin images to specific digests that have been tested for compatibility, ensuring reliable deployments.

4. FIPS Validation: Verify FIPS mode is active by checking container logs for successful FIPS initialization messages.

Validation

After deployment, validate your Sealed Secrets IAMGuarded FIPS installation using standard Sealed Secrets verification methods. The deployment functions as a standard Sealed Secrets instance, so all typical Sealed Secrets validation procedures apply. Additionally, verify FIPS mode is active in container logs.

Prerequisites

Prerequisites are defined in the chart's Chart.yaml and individual templates. No additional requirements beyond standard Kubernetes and Helm functionality are needed.

Security Considerations

The Sealed Secrets IAMGuarded FIPS chart provides FIPS-compliant, security-minded defaults while acknowledging the cluster-specific nature of both Sealed Secrets and Kubernetes environments. Review and adjust settings based on your specific security requirements and cluster configuration.

For detailed configuration options and advanced usage, refer to the chart's values.yaml file.

Documentation and Resources

Please refer to the upstream documentation for more details.

What are Chainguard Containers?

Chainguard's free tier of Starter container images are built with Wolfi, our minimal Linux undistro.

All other Chainguard Containers are built with Chainguard OS, Chainguard's minimal Linux operating system designed to produce container images that meet the requirements of a more secure software supply chain.

The main features of Chainguard Containers include:

• Minimal design, without unnecessary software bloat
• Daily builds to ensure container images are up-to-date with available security patches
• High quality build-time SBOMs attesting to the provenance of all artifacts within the image
• Verifiable signatures provided by Sigstore
• Reproducible builds with Cosign and apko (read more about reproducibility)

For cases where you need container images with shells and package managers to build or debug, most Chainguard Containers come paired with a development, or -dev, variant.

In all other cases, including Chainguard Containers tagged as :latest or with a specific version number, the container images include only an open-source application and its runtime dependencies. These minimal container images typically do not contain a shell or package manager.

Although the -dev container image variants have similar security features as their more minimal versions, they include additional software that is typically not necessary in production environments. We recommend using multi-stage builds to copy artifacts from the -dev variant into a more minimal production image.

Need additional packages?

To improve security, Chainguard Containers include only essential dependencies. Need more packages? Chainguard customers can use Custom Assembly to add packages, either through the Console, chainctl, or API.

To use Custom Assembly in the Chainguard Console: navigate to the image you'd like to customize in your Organization's list of images, and click on the Customize image button at the top of the page.

Learn More

Refer to our Chainguard Containers documentation on Chainguard Academy. Chainguard also offers VMs and Libraries — contact us for access.

Trademarks

This software listing is packaged by Chainguard. The trademarks set forth in this offering are owned by their respective companies, and use of them does not imply any affiliation, sponsorship, or endorsement by such companies.