Azure Key Vault Administration client library for JavaScript

Azure Key Vault Managed HSM is a fully-managed, highly-available, single-tenant, standards-compliant cloud service that enables you to safeguard cryptographic keys for your cloud applications using FIPS 140-2 Level 3 validated HSMs. If you would like to know more about Azure Key Vault Managed HSM, you may want to review: What is Azure Key Vault Managed HSM?

The package @azure/keyvault-admin provides support for administrative Key Vault tasks such as full backup / restore and key-level role-based access control (RBAC).

Note: The Administration library only works with Azure Key Vault Managed HSM - functions targeting a Key Vault will fail.

Note: This package cannot be used in the browser due to Azure Key Vault service limitations, please refer to this document for guidance.

Key links:

Getting started

Install the package

Install the Azure Key Vault administration client library for JavaScript and TypeScript with NPM:

npm install @azure/keyvault-admin

Currently supported environments

LTS versions of Node.js

Prerequisites

An Azure subscription
A Key Vault resource

Getting Azure credentials

Use the Azure CLI snippet below to create/get client secret credentials.

Create a service principal and configure its access to Azure resources:

az ad sp create-for-rbac -n <your-application-name> --skip-assignment

Output:

{
  "appId": "generated-app-ID",
  "displayName": "some-app-name",
  "name": "http://some-app-name",
  "password": "random-password",
  "tenant": "tenant-ID"
}

Take note of the service principal objectId

az ad sp show --id <appId> --query objectId

Output:

"<your-service-principal-object-id>"

Use the returned credentials above to set AZURE_CLIENT_ID (appId), AZURE_CLIENT_SECRET (password), and AZURE_TENANT_ID (tenant) environment variables.

Get or create an Azure Managed HSM with the Azure CLI

Create the Managed HSM and grant the above mentioned service principal authorization to perform administrative operations on the Azure Key Vault (replace <your-resource-group-name> and <your-key-vault-name> with your own, unique names and <your-service-principal-object-id> with the value from above):
```
az keyvault create --hsm-name <your-key-vault-name> --resource-group <your-resource-group-name> --administrators <your-service-principal-object-id> --location <your-azure-location>
```
This service principal is automatically added to the "Managed HSM Administrators" built-in role.
Use the above mentioned Azure Key Vault name to retrieve details of your Vault which also contains your Azure Key Vault URL:
```
az keyvault show --hsm-name <your-key-vault-name>
```

Activate your managed HSM

All data plane commands are disabled until the HSM is activated. You will not be able to create keys or assign roles. Only the designated administrators that were assigned during the create command can activate the HSM. To activate the HSM you must download the security domain.

To activate your HSM you need:

Minimum 3 RSA key-pairs (maximum 10)
Specify minimum number of keys required to decrypt the security domain (quorum)

To activate the HSM you send at least 3 (maximum 10) RSA public keys to the HSM. The HSM encrypts the security domain with these keys and sends it back. Once this security domain is successfully downloaded, your HSM is ready to use. You also need to specify quorum, which is the minimum number of private keys required to decrypt the security domain.

The example below shows how to use openssl to generate 3 self signed certificate.

openssl req -newkey rsa:2048 -nodes -keyout cert_0.key -x509 -days 365 -out cert_0.cer
openssl req -newkey rsa:2048 -nodes -keyout cert_1.key -x509 -days 365 -out cert_1.cer
openssl req -newkey rsa:2048 -nodes -keyout cert_2.key -x509 -days 365 -out cert_2.cer

Use the az keyvault security-domain download command to download the security domain and activate your managed HSM. The example below, uses 3 RSA key pairs (only public keys are needed for this command) and sets the quorum to 2.

az keyvault security-domain download --hsm-name <your-key-vault-name> --sd-wrapping-keys ./certs/cert_0.cer ./certs/cert_1.cer ./certs/cert_2.cer --sd-quorum 2 --security-domain-file ContosoMHSM-SD.json

Controlling access to your managed HSM

The designated administrators assigned during creation are automatically added to the "Managed HSM Administrators" built-in role, who are able to download a security domain and manage roles for data plane access, among other limited permissions.

To perform other actions on keys, you need to assign principals to other roles such as "Managed HSM Crypto User", which can perform non-destructive key operations:

az keyvault role assignment create --hsm-name <your-key-vault-name> --role "Managed HSM Crypto User" --scope / --assignee-object-id <principal-or-user-object-ID> --assignee-principal-type <principal-type>

Please read best practices for properly securing your managed HSM.

Get or create an Azure Storage Account with the Azure CLI

A storage account is necessary to generate the backup of a Key Vault.

To generate Key Vault backups, you will need to point the KeyVaultBackupClient to an existing Storage account.

To create a new Storage Account, you can use the Azure Portal, Azure PowerShell, or the Azure CLI. Here's an example using the Azure CLI:

az storage account create --name MyStorageAccount --resource-group MyResourceGroup --location westus --sku Standard_LRS

Configure TypeScript

TypeScript users need to have Node type definitions installed:

npm install @types/node

You also need to enable compilerOptions.allowSyntheticDefaultImports in your tsconfig.json. Note that if you have enabled compilerOptions.esModuleInterop, allowSyntheticDefaultImports is enabled by default. See TypeScript's compiler options handbook for more information.

Authenticate the client

In order to control permissions to the Key Vault service or to generate and restore backups of a specific Key Vault, you'll need to create either an instance of the KeyVaultAccessControlClient class or an instance of the KeyVaultBackupClient class, respectively.

In both cases, you'll need a vault URL, which you may see as "DNS Name" in the portal, and a credential object from the @azure/identity package which is used to authenticate with Azure Active Directory.

In the below example, we are using a client secret credentials (client id, client secret, tenant id), but you can find more ways to authenticate with Azure Identity. To use the DefaultAzureCredential provider shown below, or other credential providers provided with the Azure SDK, you should install the @azure/identity package:

npm install @azure/identity

Create KeyVaultAccessControlClient

Once you've populated the AZURE_CLIENT_ID, AZURE_CLIENT_SECRET and AZURE_TENANT_ID environment variables and replaced your-vault-url with the above returned URI, you can create the KeyVaultAccessControlClient:

const { DefaultAzureCredential } = require("@azure/identity");
const { KeyVaultAccessControlClient } = require("@azure/keyvault-admin");

const credentials = new DefaultAzureCredential();

const vaultUrl = `https://<MY KEY VAULT HERE>.vault.azure.net`;
const client = new KeyVaultAccessControlClient(vaultUrl, credentials);

Create KeyVaultBackupClient

const { DefaultAzureCredential } = require("@azure/identity");
const { KeyVaultBackupClient } = require("@azure/keyvault-admin");

const credentials = new DefaultAzureCredential();

const vaultUrl = `https://<MY KEY VAULT HERE>.vault.azure.net`;
const client = new KeyVaultBackupClient(vaultUrl, credentials);

Key concepts

KeyVaultRoleDefinition

A Role Definition is a collection of permissions. A role definition defines the operations that can be performed, such as read, write, and delete. It can also define the operations that are excluded from allowed operations.

Role definitions can be listed and specified as part of a KeyVaultRoleAssignment.

KeyVaultRoleAssignment.

A Role Assignment is the association of a Role Definition to a service principal. They can be created, listed, fetched individually, and deleted.

KeyVaultAccessControlClient

A KeyVaultAccessControlClient provides operations allowing for management of Role Definitions (instances of KeyVaultRoleDefinition) and Role Assignments (instances of KeyVaultRoleAssignment).

KeyVaultBackupClient

A KeyVaultBackupClient provides operations for performing full key backups, full key restores, and selective key restores.

Long running operations

The operations done by the KeyVaultBackupClient may take as much time as needed by the Azure resources, requiring a client layer to keep track, serialize, and resume the operations through the lifecycle of the programs that wait for them to finish. This is done via a common abstraction through the package @azure/core-lro.

The KeyVaultBackupClient offers three methods that execute long running operations:

beginBackup, starts generating a backup of an Azure Key Vault on the specified Storage Blob account.
beginRestore, starts restoring all key materials using the SAS token pointing to a previously stored Azure Blob storage backup folder.
beginSelectiveRestore, starts restoring all key versions of a given key using user supplied SAS token pointing to a previously stored Azure Blob storage backup folder.

The methods that begin long running operations return a poller that allows you to wait indefinitely until the operation is complete. More information is available in the examples below.

Examples

We have samples both in JavaScript and TypeScript that show the access control and backup/restore features in this package. Please follow the corresponding readmes for detailed steps to run the samples.

Troubleshooting

Enabling logging may help uncover useful information about failures. In order to see a log of HTTP requests and responses, set the AZURE_LOG_LEVEL environment variable to info. Alternatively, logging can be enabled at runtime by calling setLogLevel in the @azure/logger:

const { setLogLevel } = require("@azure/logger");

setLogLevel("info");

Next steps

You can find more code samples through the following links:

Contributing

If you'd like to contribute to this library, please read the contributing guide to learn more about how to build and test the code.

Impressions