cert-manager - v1.14.0

cert-manager is the easiest way to automatically manage certificates in Kubernetes and OpenShift clusters.

⚠️ This version has known issues. Please install v1.14.1 instead.

During the release of v1.14.0, the Helm chart was found to use the wrong OCI image for the cainjector Deployment,
which caused the Helm installation and the static manifest based installation to fail.
Upon discovery of this bug, the release of v1.14.0 was paused before the Helm chart or GitHub release were published;
but the Git tag and the OCI images had already been published.

The cert-manager team next fixed the Helm chart and two other bugs which are listed in the "Known Issues" section below,
and then released v1.14.1, which is the version that users are strongly advised to install when they upgrade to 1.14.

In order to complete the stalled v1.14.0 release,
the Helm chart and static YAML installation files were regenerated on a team member's laptop,
using exactly the same build scripts as are used in the automated release process,
and using the v1.14.1 version of the code.
The working v1.14.0 Helm chart was published,
and the working versions of the static manifest files attached to the draft v1.14.0 GitHub release,
and that was then published.

For these reasons, users are strongly advised to skip this version and install the v1.14.1 Helm chart instead.

Known Issues

• During the release of v1.14.0, the Helm chart for this version was found to use the wrong OCI image for the cainjector Deployment,
  which caused the Helm installation to fail.
  In order to complete the release, the cert-manager team have manually updated the Helm chart for this version,
  which contains all the Helm chart fixes which are in v1.14.1.
  But users are strongly advised to skip this version and install the v1.14.1 Helm chart instead.
• A bug in cmctl namespace detection prevents it being used as a startupapicheck image in namespaces other than cert-manager.
• A bug in cmctl causes cmctl experimental install to panic.
  cert-manager 1.14 brings a variety of features, security improvements and bug fixes, including: support for creating X.509 certificates with "Other Name" fields, and support for creating CA certificates with "Name Constraints" and "Authority Information Accessors" extensions.

Breaking Changes

The startupapicheck job uses a new OCI image called "startupapicheck", instead of the ctl image.
If you run in an environment in which images cannot be pulled, be sure to include the new image.

The KeyUsage and BasicConstraints extensions will now be encoded as critical in the CertificateRequest's CSR blob.

Major Themes

New X.509 Features

The cert-manager Certificate resource now allows you to configure a subset of "Other Name" SANs,
which are described in the Subject Alternative Name section of RFC 5280 (on page 37).

We specifically support any otherName type with a UTF-8 value, such as the User Principal Name or sAMAccountName.
These are useful when issuing unique certificates for authenticating with LDAP systems such as Microsoft Active Directory.
For example you can create certificates with this block in the spec:

  otherNames:
    - oid: 1.3.6.1.4.1.311.20.2.3 # UPN OID
      utf8Value: upn@domain.local

The feature is still in alpha stage and requires you to enable the OtherName feature flag in the controller and webhook components.

New CA certificate Features

You can now specify the X.509 v3 Authority Information Accessors extension,
with URLs for certificates issued by the CA issuer.

Users can now use name constraints in CA certificates.
To know more details on name constraints check out RFC section https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5280#section-4.2.1.10

Security

An ongoing security audit of the cert-manager code revealed some weaknesses which we have addressed in this release,
such as using more secure default settings in the HTTP servers that serve metrics, healthz and pprof endpoints.
This will help mitigate denial-of-service attacks against those important services.

All the cert-manager containers are now configured with read only root file system by default,
to prevent unexpected changes to the file system of the OCI image.

And it is now possible to configure the metrics server to use HTTPS rather than HTTP,
so that clients can verify the identity of the metrics server.

Other

The liveness probe of the cert-manager controller Pod is now enabled by default.

There is a new option .spec.keystores.pkcs12.algorithms to specify encryption and MAC algorithms for PKCS.

Community

Thanks again to all open-source contributors with commits in this release, including:
- @ABWassim
- @JoeNorth
- @allenmunC1
- @asapekia
- @jeremycampbell
- @jkroepke
- @jsoref
- @lauraseidler
- @pevidex
- @phillebaba
- @snorwin
- @tanujd11
- @tberreis
- @vinny

Thanks also to the following cert-manager maintainers for their contributions during this release:
- @SgtCoDFish
- @SpectralHiss
- @ThatsMrTalbot
- @hawksight
- @inteon
- @maelvls
- @wallrj

Equally thanks to everyone who provided feedback, helped users and raised issues on GitHub and Slack and joined our meetings!

Thanks also to the CNCF, which provides resources and support, and to the AWS open source team for being good community members and for their maintenance of the PrivateCA Issuer.

In addition, massive thanks to Venafi for contributing developer time and resources towards the continued maintenance of cert-manager projects.

Changes

Feature

• ACME challenge solver Pod for HTTP01 will get a default annotation of "cluster-autoscaler.kubernetes.io/safe-to-evict": "true". You can provide an annotation of "cluster-autoscaler.kubernetes.io/safe-to-evict": "false" in your podTemplate if you don't like this. (#6349, @jsoref)
• Added a clock skew detector liveness probe that will force a restart in case we detect a skew between the internal monotonic clock and the system clock of more than 5 minutes.
  Also, the controller's liveness probe is now enabled by default. (#6328, @inteon)
• Added a new flag (--dynamic-serving-leaf-duration) that can adjust the lifetime of the dynamic leaf certificates (#6552, @allenmunC1)
• Added support for otherName SANS in Certificates (#6404, @SpectralHiss)
• Added the option to specify the X.509 v3 Authority Information Accessors extension CA Issuers URLs for certificates issued by the CA issuer. (#6486, @jeremycampbell)
• Adds cert-manager's new core infrastructure initiative badge! See more details on https://www.bestpractices.dev/projects/8079 (#6497, @SgtCoDFish)
• All Pods are now configured with readOnlyRootFilesystem by default. (#6453, @wallrj)
• MAYBE BREAKING: The startupapicheck job is now handled by an entirely new container called "startupapicheck". This replaces the previous ctl container. If you run in an environment in which images cannot be pulled, be sure to include the new container. (#6549, @SgtCoDFish)
• New option .spec.keystores.pkcs12.algorithms to specify encryption and MAC algorithms for PKCS#12 keystores. Fixes issues #5957 and #6523. (#6548, @snorwin)
• The ACME HTTP01 solver Pod is now configured with readOnlyRootFilesystem: true (#6462, @wallrj)
• Updates the AWS SDK for Go to 1.48.7 to support Amazon EKS Pod Identity (#6519, @JoeNorth)
• Users can now use name constraints in CA certificates. To know more details on name constraints check out RFC section https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5280#section-4.2.1.10 (#6500, @tanujd11)
• ⚠️ potentially breaking ⚠️: The KeyUsage and BasicConstraints extensions will now be encoded as critical in the CertificateRequest's CSR blob. (#6053, @inteon)
• Add TLS support to the metrics endpoint through either a certificate file or through dynamically issued certificates (#6574, @ThatsMrTalbot)
• Helm Chart: allow changing the default Deployment revisionHistoryLimit (#6248, @tberreis)
• Security: Limit the size of the response body read from HTTP requests by cert-manager. (#6619, @ThatsMrTalbot)
• Support custom spec.namespaceSelector for webhooks (#6638, @jkroepke)

Bug or Regression

• BUGFIX[helm]: Fix issue where webhook feature gates were only set if controller feature gates are set. (#6380, @asapekia)
• Controller ConfigMap is now created only if .Values.config is set. (#6357, @ABWassim)
• Fix runaway bug caused by multiple Certificate resources that point to the same Secret resource. (#6406, @inteon)
• Fix(helm): templating of required value in controller and webhook ConfigMap resources (#6435, @ABWassim)
• Fixed a webhook validation error message when the key algorithm was invalid. (#6571, @pevidex)
• Fixed error messaging when setting up vault issuer (#6433, @vinny)
• GHSA-vgf6-pvf4-34rq: The webhook server now returns HTTP error 413 (Content Too Large) for requests with body size >= 3MiB. This is to mitigate DoS attacks that attempt to crash the webhook process by sending large requests that exceed the available memory.
  The webhook server now returns HTTP error 400 (Bad Request) if the request contains an empty body.
  The webhook server now returns HTTP error 500 (Internal Server Error) rather than crashing, if the code panics while handling a request. (#6498, @inteon)
• Increase the default webhook timeout to its maximum value of 30 seconds, so that the underlying timeout error message has more chance of being returned to the end user. (#6488, @wallrj)
• Listeners that do not support TLS on Gateway resources will now not raise BadConfig warnings anymore (#6347, @lauraseidler)
• Mitigate potential Slowloris attacks by setting ReadHeaderTimeout in all http.Server instances (#6534, @wallrj)
• The Venafi issuer now properly resets the certificate and should no longer get stuck with WebSDK CertRequest Module Requested Certificate or This certificate cannot be processed while it is in an error state. Fix any errors, and then click Retry.. (#6398, @maelvls)
• Update experimental install and uninstall commands to have flag parity with the rest of the CLI (#6562, @ThatsMrTalbot)
• Webhook ConfigMap if now created only if .Values.webhook.config is set. (#6360, @ABWassim)
• BUGFIX: Ensure otherName SAN changes in Certificate resources trigger re-issuance. (#6620, @SpectralHiss)
• Bugfix: Publish the startupapicheck image to quay.io (#6609, @wallrj)

Other (Cleanup or Flake)

• Cert-manager is now built with Go 1.21.5 (#6545, @wallrj)
• Bump Go to 1.21.3 to address CVE-2023-39325. Also bumps base images. (#6410, @SgtCoDFish)
• Bump golang.org/x/net v0.15.0 => v0.17.0 as part of addressing CVE-2023-44487 / CVE-2023-39325 (#6427, @SgtCoDFish)
• Check code for unintended use of crypto/md5, a weak cryptographic primitive; using golangci-lint / gosec (G501). (#6581, @wallrj)
• Check code for unintended use of crypto/sha1, a weak cryptographic primitive; using golangci-lint / gosec (G505). (#6579, @wallrj)
• Check code for unintended use of weak random number generator (math/rand instead of crypto/rand); using golangci-lint / gosec (G404). (#6582, @wallrj)
• Cleanup: Restrict MutatingWebhookConfiguration to only CertificateRequest resources (#6311, @hawksight)
• Deprecated pkg/util.RandStringRunes and pkg/controller/test.RandStringBytes. Use k8s.io/apimachinery/pkg/util/rand.String instead. (#6585, @wallrj)
• Enabled verbose logging in startupapicheck by default, so that if it fails, users can know exactly what caused the failure. (#6495, @wallrj)
• Fix gosec G601: Implicit memory aliasing of items from a range statement (#6551, @wallrj)
• Fix handling of serial numbers in literal certificate subjects. Previously a serial number could be specified in subject.serialNumber while using a literal certificate subject. This was a mistake and has been fixed. (#6533, @inteon)
• The end-to-end tests can now test the cert-manager Vault Issuer on an OpenShift cluster. (#6391, @wallrj)
• Update cert-manager's distroless base images from Debian 11 to Debian 12. This should have no practical effects on users. (#6583, @inteon)
• Updated all code using GatewayAPI to use the now GA v1 APIs (#6559, @ThatsMrTalbot)
• Upgrade Go from 1.20.7 to 1.20.8. (#6369, @inteon)
• Upgrade github.com/emicklei/go-restful/v3 to v3.11.0 because v3.10.2 is labeled as "DO NOT USE". (#6366, @inteon)
• Use the new generic sets.Set type in place of the deprecated sets.String. (#6586, @wallrj)
• cert-manager is now built with Go v1.21.6 (#6628, @SgtCoDFish)
• Update the Azure SDK and remove deprecated autorest dependency (#5452, @phillebaba)
• The cert-manager E2E tests can now be run on Kubernetes 1.29 (#6641, @wallrj)