Installation | Usage | How does it work? | Module options

🔐 agenix-rekey

This is an extension for agenix which allows you to get rid of maintaining a secrets.nix file by automatically re-encrypting secrets where needed. It also allows you to define versatile generators for secrets, so they can be bootstrapped automatically. This extension is a flakes-only project and can be used alongside regular use of agenix.

To make use of rekeying, you will have to store secrets in your repository by encrypting them with a master key (YubiKey or regular age identity), and agenix-rekey will automatically re-encrypt these secrets for any host that requires them. A YubiKey is highly recommended and will provide you with a smooth rekeying experience. In summary, you get:

• 🔑 Single master-key. Anything in your repository is encrypted by your master YubiKey or age identity.
• ➡️ Host-key inference. No need to manually keep track of which key is needed for which host - no secrets.nix.
• ✔️ Less secret management. Rekeyed secrets never have to be added to your flake repository, thus you only have to keep track of the actual secret. Also a leaked host-key doesn't allow an attacker to decrypt older checked-in secrets, in case your repo is public.
• 🦥 Lazy rekeying. Rekeying only occurs when necessary, since the results are encrypted and can thus be cached in a local directory. If secret is added/changed or a host key is modified, you will automatically be prompted to rekey.
• 🚀 Simplified host bootstrapping. Automatic rekeying can use a dummy pubkey for unknown target hosts, so you can bootstrap a new system for which the pubkey isn't yet known. Runtime decryption will of course fail, but then the ssh host key will be generated.
• 🔐 Secret generation. You can define generators to bootstrap secrets. Very useful if you want random passwords for a service, need random wireguard private/preshared keys, or need to aggregate several secrets into a derived secret (for example by generating a .htpasswd file).

To function properly, agenix-rekey has to do some nix gymnastics. You can read more about how it works below. Remarks:

• Since age-plugin-yubikey 0.4.0 the PIN is required only once. Using a password protected master key will never have this benefit, and the password will alwas be required for each rekeying operation. There's no way around that without caching the key, which I didn't want to do.

Overview

When using agenix-reke, you will have an agenix command to run secret-related actions on your flake. This is a replacement for the command provided by agenix, which you won't need anymore. There are several apps/subcommands which you can use to manage your secrets:

• agenix generate: Generates any secrets that don't exist yet and have a generator set.
• agenix edit: Create/edit secrets using $EDITOR. Can encrypt existing files.
• agenix rekey: Rekeys secrets for hosts that require them.
• Use agenix <command> --help for specific usage information.

The general workflow is quite simple, because you will automatically be prompted to run agenix rekey whenever it is necessary (the build will fail and tell you).

Installation

To use agenix-rekey, you will have to add agenix-rekey to your flake.nix, import the provided NixOS module in your hosts and expose some information in your flake so agenix-rekey knows where to look for secrets.

To get the agenix command, you can either use nix shell github:oddlama/agenix-rekey to enter a shell where it is available temporarily, or alternatively add the provided package agenix-rekey.packages.${system}.default to your devshell (see below).

You can also directly call the scripts through your flake with nix run .#agenix-rekey.apps.<system>.<app> if you don't want to use the wrapper, which may be useful for use in your own scripts.

{
  inputs.flake-utils.url = "github:numtide/flake-utils";
  inputs.agenix.url = "github:ryantm/agenix";
  inputs.agenix-rekey.url = "github:oddlama/agenix-rekey";
  # Make sure to override the nixpkgs version to follow your flake,
  # otherwise derivation paths can mismatch, resulting in the rekeyed
  # secrets not being found!
  inputs.agenix-rekey.inputs.nixpkgs.follows = "nixpkgs";
  # also works with inputs.ragenix.url = ...;
  # ...

  outputs = { self, nixpkgs, agenix, agenix-rekey }: {
    # Example system configuration
    nixosConfigurations.yourhostname = nixpkgs.lib.nixosSystem {
      system = "x86_64-linux";
      modules = [
        ./configuration.nix
        agenix.nixosModules.default
        agenix-rekey.nixosModules.default
      ];
    };

    # Expose the necessary information in your flake so agenix-rekey
    # knows where it has too look for secrets and paths.
    #
    # Make sure that the pkgs passed here comes from the same nixpkgs version as
    # the pkgs used on your hosts in `nixosConfigurations`, otherwise the rekeyed
    # derivations will not be found!
    agenix-rekey = agenix-rekey.configure {
      userFlake = self;
      nodes = self.nixosConfigurations;
      # Example for colmena:
      # inherit ((colmena.lib.makeHive self.colmena).introspect (x: x)) nodes;
    };
  }
  # OPTIONAL: This part is only needed if you want to have the agenix
  # command in your devshell.
  // flake-utils.lib.eachDefaultSystem (system: rec {
    pkgs = import nixpkgs {
      inherit system;
      overlays = [ agenix-rekey.overlays.default ];
    };
    devShells.default = pkgs.mkShell {
      packages = [ pkgs.agenix-rekey ];
      # ...
    };
  });
}

Usage

Since agenix-rekey is just an extension to agenix, everything you know about agenix still applies as usual. Apart from specifying meta information about your master key, the only thing that you have to change to use rekeying is to specify rekeyFile instead of file on your secrets. The full setup process is the following:

1. For each host, you have to provide a pubkey for rekeying and select the master identity to use for decrypting the secrets stored in your repository. The hostPubkey will obviously be different for each host, but all other options (like your master identity) will usually be the same across hosts. You can find more options in the api reference below.

   {
     age.rekey = {
       # Obtain this using `ssh-keyscan` or by looking it up in your ~/.ssh/known_hosts
       hostPubkey = "ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAAI...";
       # The path to the master identity used for decryption. See the option's description for more information.
       masterIdentities = [ ./your-yubikey-identity.pub ];
       #masterIdentities = [ "/home/myuser/master-key" ]; # External master key
       #masterIdentities = [ "/home/myuser/master-key.age" ]; # Password protected external master key
     };
   }

2. Encrypt some secrets using (r)age and your master key. agenix-rekey comes with a CLI utility called agenix, which allows you to easily create/edit secrets using your favorite $EDITOR, and automatically uses the correct identities for de- and encryption according to the settings from Step 1.

   Ideally you should have added it to your devshell as described in the installation section, otherwise you can run the utility ad-hoc with nix run github:oddlama/agenix-rekey -- <SUBCOMMAND> [OPTIONS].

   # Create new or edit existing secret
   agenix edit secret1.age
   # Or encrypt an existing file
   agenix edit -i plain.txt secret1.age
   # If no parameter is given, this will present an interactive list with all defined secrets
   # so you can choose which once you want to create/edit
   agenix edit
   
   # Alternatively you can of course manually encrypt something using (r)age
   echo "secret" | rage -e -i ./your-yubikey-identity.pub > secret1.age

   Be careful when choosing your $EDITOR here, it might leak secret information when editing the file by means of undo-history, or caching in general. For vim and nvim this app automatically disables related options to make it safe to use.

3. Define a secret in your config and use it. This works similar to classical agenix, but instead of file you now specify rekeyFile (which then generates a definition for file).

   {
     age.secrets.secret1.rekeyFile = ./secret1.age;
     services.someService.passwordFile = config.age.secrets.secret1.path;
   }

4. Deploy your system as usual by using nixos-rebuild or your favourite deployment tool. In case you need to rekey, you will be prompted to do that as part of a build failure that will be triggered. Since we just did the initial setup, you should rekey right away:

   > agenix rekey

   [!WARNING] Since agenix rekey must be able to set extra sandbox paths, your user must either be a trusted-users in your nix.conf, or you need to add age.rekey.cacheDir as a global extra sandbox path:

   nix.settings.extra-sandbox-paths = ["/tmp/agenix-rekey.${config.users.users.youruser.uid}"];

   See issue #9 for more information about a user-agnostic setup.

   [!NOTE] If you are deploying your configuration to remote systems, you need to make sure that the correct derivation containing the rekeyed secrets is copied from your local store to the remote host's store.

   Any tool that builds locally and uses nix copy (or equivalent tools) to copy the derivations to your remote systems will work automatically, so no additional care has to be taken. Only when you strictly build on your remotes, you might have to copy those secrets manually. You can target them by using agenix rekey --show-out-paths or by directly referring to nixosConfigurations.<host>.config.age.rekey.derivation

Secret generation

With agenix-rekey, you can define generators on your secrets which can be used to bootstrap secrets or derive secrets from other secrets.

In the simplest cases you can refer to a predefined existing generator, the example below would generate a random 6 word passphrase using the age.generators.passphrase generator:

{
  age.secrets.randomPassword = {
    rekeyFile = ./secrets/randomPassword.age;
    generator.script = "passphrase";
  };
}

You can also define your own generators, either by creating an entry in age.generators to make a reusable generator like "passphrase" above, or directly by setting age.secrets.<name>.generator to a generator definition.

A generator is a set consisting of two attributes, a script and optionally some dependencies. The script must either be a string referring to one of the globally defined generators, or a function. This function receives an attrset with arguments and has to return a bash script, which acutally generates and writes the desired secret to stdout. A very simple (and bad) generator would thus be { ... }: "echo very-secret".

The arguments passed to the script will contain some useful attributes that we can use to define our generation script.

Argument	Description
name	The name of the secret to be generated, as defined in age.secrets.<name>
secret	The definition of the secret to be generated
lib	Convenience access to the nixpkgs library
pkgs	The package set for the host that is running the generation script. Don't use any other packgage set in the script!
file	The actual path to the .age file that will be written after this function returns and the content is encrypted. Useful to write additional information to adjacent files.
deps	The list of all secret files from our dependencies. Each entry is a set of { name, host, file }, corresponding to the secret nixosConfigurations.${host}.age.secrets.${name}. file is the true source location of the secret's rekeyFile. You can extract the plaintext with ${decrypt} ${escapeShellArg dep.file}.
decrypt	The base rage command that can decrypt secrets to stdout by using the defined masterIdentities.
...	For future/unused arguments

First let's have a look at defining a very simple generator that creates longer passphrases. Notice how we use the passed pkgs set instead of the package set from the config.

{
  # Allows you to use "long-passphrase" as a generator.
  age.generators.long-passphrase = {pkgs, ...}: "${pkgs.xkcdpass}/bin/xkcdpass --numwords=10";
}

Another common case is generating secret keys, for which we also directly want to derive the matching public keys and store them in an adjacent .pub file:

{
  age.generators.wireguard-priv = {pkgs, file, ...}: ''
    priv=$(${pkgs.wireguard-tools}/bin/wg genkey)
    ${pkgs.wireguard-tools}/bin/wg pubkey <<< "$priv" > ${lib.escapeShellArg (lib.removeSuffix ".age" file + ".pub")}
    echo "$priv"
  '';
}

By utilizing deps and decrypt, we can also generate secrets that depend on the value of other secrets. You might encounter this when you want to generate a .htpasswd file from several cleartext passwords which are also generated automatically:

{
  # Generate a random password
  age.secrets.basic-auth-pw = {
    rekeyFile = ./secrets/basic-auth-pw.age;
    generator.script = "alnum";
  };

  # Generate a htpasswd from several random passwords
  age.secrets.some-htpasswd = {
    rekeyFile = ./secrets/htpasswd.age;
    generator = {
      # All these secrets will be generated first and their paths are
      # passed to the `script` as `deps` when this secret is being generated.
      # You can refer to age secrets of other systems, as long as all relevant systems
      # are passed to the agenix-rekey app definition via the nixosConfigurations parameter.
      dependencies = [
        # A local secret
        config.age.secrets.basic-auth-pw
        # Secrets from other machines
        nixosConfigurations.machine2.config.age.secrets.basic-auth-pw
        nixosConfigurations.machine3.config.age.secrets.basic-auth-pw
      ];
      script = { pkgs, lib, decrypt, deps, ... }:
        # For each dependency, we can use `decrypt` to get the plaintext.
        # We run that through apache's htpasswd to create a htpasswd entry.
        # Since all commands output to stdout, we automatically have a valid
        # htpasswd file afterwards.
        lib.flip lib.concatMapStrings deps ({ name, host, file }: ''
          echo "Aggregating "''${lib.escapeShellArg host}:''${lib.escapeShellArg name} >&2
          # Decrypt the dependency containing the cleartext password,
          # and run it through htpasswd to generate a bcrypt hash
          ${decrypt} ${lib.escapeShellArg file} \
            | ${pkgs.apacheHttpd}/bin/htpasswd -niBC 10 ${lib.escapeShellArg host}
        '');
    };
  };
}

How does it work?

The central problem is that rekeying secrets on-the-fly while building your system is fundamentally impossible, since it is an impure operation. It will always require an external input in the form of your master password or has to communicate with a YubiKey.

The second problem is that building your system requires the rekeyed secrets to be available in the nix-store, which we want to achieve without requiring you to track them in git.

Working with impurity

agenix-rekey solves the impurity problem by following a two-step approach. By adding agenix-rekey, you implicitly define a script through your flake which can run in your host-environment and is thus able to prompt for passwords or read YubiKeys. It can run age to rekey the secrets and store them in a temporary cache directory.

Predicting store paths to avoid tracking rekeyed secrets

The more complicated second problem is solved by using a predictable store-path for the resulting rekeyed secrets by putting them in a special derivation for each host. This derivation is made to always fail when the build is invoked transitively by the build process, which always means rekeying is necessary.

The agenix rekey command will build the same derivation but with special access to the rekeyed secrets which will temporarily be stored in a predicable path in /tmp, for which the sandbox is allowed access to /tmp solving the impurity issue. Running the build afterwards will succeed since the derivation is now already built and available in your local store.

❄️ Module options

age.secrets

These are the secret options exposed by agenix. See age.secrets for a description of all base attributes. In the following you will read documentation for additional options added by agenix-rekey.

age.secrets.<name>.rekeyFile

Type	nullOr path
Default	null
Example	./secrets/password.age

The path to the encrypted .age file for this secret. The file must be encrypted with one of the given age.rekey.masterIdentities and not with a host-specific key.

This secret will automatically be rekeyed for hosts that use it, and the resulting host-specific .age file will be set as an actual file attribute. So naturally this is mutually exclusive with specifying file directly.

If you want to avoid having a secrets.nix file and only use rekeyed secrets, you should always use this option instead of file.

age.secrets.<name>.generator

Type	nullOr (either str generatorType)
Default	null
Example	{ script = "passphrase"; }

If defined, this generator will be used to bootstrap this secret's when it doesn't exist.

age.secrets.<name>.generator.dependencies

Type	listOf unspecified
Default	[]
Example	[ config.age.secrets.basicAuthPw1 nixosConfigurations.machine2.config.age.secrets.basicAuthPw ]

Other secrets on which this secret depends. This guarantees that in the final agenix generate script, all dependencies will be generated before this secret is generated, allowing you to use their outputs via the passed decrypt function.

The given dependencies will be passed to the defined script via the deps parameter, which will be a list of their true source locations (rekeyFile) in no particular order.

This should refer only to secret definitions from config.age.secrets that have a generator. This is useful if you want to create derived secrets, such as generating a .htpasswd file from several basic auth passwords.

You can refer to age secrets of other systems, as long as all relevant systems are passed to the agenix-rekey app definition via the nixosConfigurations parameter.

age.secrets.<name>.generator.script

Type	either str (functionTo str)
Example	See source or Secret generation.

This must either be the name of a globally defined generator, or a function that evaluates to a script. The resulting script will be added to the internal, global generation script verbatim and runs outside of any sandbox. Refer to age.generators for example usage.

This allows you to create/overwrite adjacent files if necessary, for example when you also want to store the public key for a generated private key. Refer to the example for a description of the arguments. The resulting secret should be written to stdout and any info or errors to stderr.

Note that the script is run with set -euo pipefail conditions as the normal user that runs agenix generate.

age.secrets.<name>.generator.tags

Type	listOf str
Default	[]
Example	["wireguard"]

Optional list of tags that may be used to refer to secrets that use this generator. Useful to regenerate all secrets matching a specific tag using agenix generate -f -t wireguard.

age.generators

Type	attrsOf (functionTo str)
Default	Defines some common password generators. See source.
Example	See source or Secret generation.

Allows defining reusable secret generator scripts. By default these generators are provided:

• alnum: Generates an alphanumeric string of length 48
• base64: Generates a base64 string of 32-byte random (length 44)
• hex: Generates a hex string of 24-byte random (length 48)
• passphrase: Generates a 6-word passphrase delimited by spaces
• dhparams: Generates 4096-bit dhparams
• ssh-ed25519: Generates a ssh-ed25519 private key

age.rekey.derivation

Type	package
Default	A derivation containing the rekeyed secrets for this host
Read-only	yes

The derivation that contains the rekeyed secrets for this host. This exists so you can target the secrets for uploading to a remote host if necessary. Cannot be built directly, use agenix rekey instead.

age.rekey.generatedSecretsDir

Type	nullOr path
Default	null
Example	./secrets/generated

The path where all generated secrets should be stored by default. If set, this automatically sets age.secrets.<name>.rekeyFile to a default value in this directory, for any secret that defines a generator.

age.rekey.cacheDir

Type	str
Default	"/tmp/agenix-rekey.\"$UID\""
Example	"\"\${XDG_CACHE_HOME:=$HOME/.cache}/agenix-rekey\""

This is the directory where we store the rekeyed secrets so that they can be found later by the derivation builder.

Must be a bash expression that expands to the directory to use as a cache. By default the cache is kept in /tmp, but you can change it to (see example) to persist the cache across reboots. Make sure to use corret quoting, this must be a bash expression resulting in a single string.

The actual secrets will be stored in the directory based on their input content hash (derived from host pubkey and file content hash), and stored as ${cacheDir}/secrets/<ident-sha256>-<filename>. This allows us to reuse already existing rekeyed secrets when rekeying again, while providing a deterministic path for each secret.

age.rekey.forceRekeyOnSystem

Type	nullOr str
Default	null
Example	"x86_64-linux"

If set, this will force that all secrets are rekeyed on a system of the given architecture. This is important if you have several hosts with different architectures, since you usually don't want to build the derivation containing the rekeyed secrets on a random remote host.

The problem is that each derivation will always depend on at least one specific architecture (often it's bash), since it requires a builder to create it. Usually the builder will use the architecture for which the package is built, which makes sense. Since it is part of the derivation inputs, we have to know it in advance to predict where the output will be. If you have multiple architectures, then we'd have multiple candidate derivations for the rekeyed secrets, but we want a single predictable derivation.

If you tried to deploy an aarch64-linux system, but are on x86_64-linux without binary emulation, then nix would have to build the rekeyed secrets using a remote builder (since the derivation then requires aarch64-linux bash). This option will override the pkgs set passed to the derivation such that it will use a builder of the specified architecture instead. This way you can force it to always require a x86_64-linux bash, thus allowing your local system to build it.

The "automatic" and nice way would be to set this to builtins.currentSystem, but that would also be impure, so unfortunately you have to hardcode this option.

age.rekey.hostPubkey

Type	coercedTo path (x: if isPath x then readFile x else x) str
Default	"age1qyqszqgpqyqszqgpqyqszqgpqyqszqgpqyqszqgpqyqszqgpqyqs3290gq"
Example	"ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAAI....."
Example	./host1-pubkey.pub
Example	"/etc/ssh/ssh_host_ed25519_key.pub"

The age public key to use as a recipient when rekeying. This either has to be the path to an age public key file, or the public key itself in string form.

If you are managing a single host only, you can use "/etc/ssh/ssh_host_ed25519_key.pub" here to allow the rekey app to directly read your pubkey from your system. If you are managing multiple hosts, it's recommended to either store a copy of each host's pubkey in your flake and use refer to those here ./secrets/host1-pubkey.pub, or directly set the host's pubkey here by specifying "ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAAI...".

Make sure to NEVER use a private key here, as it will end up in the public nix store!

age.rekey.masterIdentities

Type	listOf (coercedTo path toString str)
Default	[]
Example	[./secrets/my-public-yubikey-identity.txt]

The list of age identities that will be presented to rage when decrypting the stored secrets to rekey them for your host(s). If multiple identities are given, they will be tried in-order.

The recommended options are:

• Use a split-identity ending in .pub, where the private part is not contained (a yubikey identity)
• Use an absolute path to your key outside the nix store ("/home/myuser/age-master-key")
• Or encrypt your age identity and use the extension .age. You can encrypt an age identity using rage -p -o privkey.age privkey which protects it in your store.

If you are using YubiKeys, you can specify multiple split-identities here and use them interchangeably. You will have the option to skip any YubiKeys that are not available to you at that moment.

Be careful when using paths here, as they will be copied to the nix store. Using split-identities is fine, but if you are using plain age identities, make sure that they are password protected.

age.rekey.extraEncryptionPubkeys

Type	listOf (coercedTo path toString str)
Default	[]
Example	[./backup-key.pub "age1qyqszqgpqyqszqgpqyqszqgpqyqszqgpqyqszqgpqyqszqgpqyqs3290gq"]
Example	["age1yubikey1qwf..."]

When using agenix edit FILE, the file will be encrypted for all identities in age.rekey.masterIdentities by default. Here you can specify an extra set of pubkeys for which all secrets should also be encrypted. This is useful in case you want to have a backup identity that must be able to decrypt all secrets but should not be used when attempting regular decryption.

If the coerced string is an absolute path, it will be used as if it was a recipient file. Otherwise, the string will be interpreted as a public key.

age.rekey.agePlugins

Type	listOf package
Default	[rekeyHostPkgs.age-plugin-yubikey]
Example	[]

A list of plugins that should be available to rage while rekeying. They will be added to the PATH with lowest-priority before rage is invoked, meaning if you have the plugin installed on your system, that one is preferred in an effort to not break complex setups (e.g. WSL passthrough).