make-secrets

A collection of GNU Make targets to generate secrets for seeding microservices, intended to help automate the creation of ad-hoc test environments and platform prototyping.

Usage

This utility is built on GNU Make. To generate new data, specify a make target in the desired directory. By default existing files will not be altered. To force a file to be re-created, see Forcing Re-creation below.

Random Strings (e.g. passwords)

Specify an arbitrary file name in the string/ directory and a plaintext ASCII file will be created containing a random alpha-numeric string.

make string/test-pwd

SSH Keys

Specify an arbitrary file name in the ssh/ directory with a suffix of either _rsa, _ecdsa, or _ed25519 and an SSH private key of the named type will be created with a corresponding public key with a .pub extension.

Setting a Password

A password for the private key can be specified in an environment variable named MAKE_SSH_PASS. The default is no password.

Configuring Bit-Length

For RSA and ECDSA a bit-length can be specified in an environment variable named MAKE_SSH_BITS. The value will be ignored for ED25519 keys.

RSA

make ssh/user_rsa

# A leading space will prevent the shell from storing the command in history
 make MAKE_SSH_PASS=secret MAKE_SSH_BITS=8096 ssh/user_rsa

Default value for MAKE_SSH_BITS is 4096.

ECDSA

make ssh/user_ecdsa

Default value for MAKE_SSH_BITS is 384.

ED25519

make ssh/user_ed25519

MAKE_SSH_BITS is ignored.

SSH Key with Auto-Generated Password

An example showing the use of both an environment variable and a make variable, as well as auto-generating the password with a string/ target.

make string/sshpass
export MAKE_SSH_BITS=521
make ssh/user_ecdsa MAKE_SSH_PASS=$(< string/sshpass)

Self-Signed x509 Certificates

Create a self-signed x509 certificate pair with V3 CA extensions by specifying an arbitrary path under the self-signed/ directory. A subdirectory will be created with two files: private.pem and public.pem. The certificate subject is localhost, and the name of the file itself is added as an alternate name.

make self-signed/example.local

Forcing Re-creation

To force Make to re-create an existing file, pass the option -B.

make -B $TARGET