Pinniped Documentation

Supervisor and Concierge Audit Logging

The Pinniped Supervisor and Pinniped Concierge components provide audit logging capabilities to help you meet your security and compliance standards.

The configuration of the Pinniped Supervisor and Pinniped Concierge is managed by Kubernetes custom resources. These resources are protected by the standard Kubernetes authorization controls and audited by the standard Kubernetes audit logging capabilities.

Pinniped also offers additional audit logging capabilities. These additional audit logs appear in the pod logs of the Supervisor and Concierge pods. Each line of the pod logs is a JSON object. Although these audit events are interleaved with other pod log messages, they are identifiable by always having an "auditEvent":true key-value pair.

APIs that can emit Pinniped audit events to the pod logs

Both the Supervisor and the Concierge offer several custom Kubernetes resources for configuration, which are protected by Kubernetes RBAC and by default are only available for administrators to use. These APIs are not part of the authentication flows for end users. Changes to these resources are audited by the standard Kubernetes audit logging. Of these resources, only two will emit additional audit events into the Supervisor or Concierge pod logs. These audit events can be cross-referenced to the standard Kubernetes audit logs using the value at the auditID key, which will be the same value in the Supervisor or Concierge pod logs and in the Kubernetes audit logs for a particular request to the resource. These resources are:

The Supervisor’s OIDCClientSecretRequest resource. This is used create client secrets for OIDCClient resources. It will emit audit events into the Supervisor pod logs to describe the changes to client secrets saved by the request.
The Concierge’s TokenCredendtialRequest resource. This is used to authenticate a user and return a temporary cluster credential for that user. It will emit audit events into the Concierge pod logs to describe the authentication success or authentication failure of the request.

Additionally, the Pinniped Supervisor offers several public APIs for end-user authentication for each configured FederationDomain. These REST APIs are not represented as Kubernetes resources, so they are not audited by the standard Kubernetes audit logging. These APIs will emit Pinniped audit events into the Supervisor pod logs. Each request may emit several audit events. These APIs include:

<issuer_path>/.well-known/openid-configuration is the standard OIDC discovery endpoint, which can be used to discover all the other endpoints listed here.
<issuer_path>/jwks.json is the standard OIDC JWKS discovery endpoint.
<issuer_path>/v1alpha1/pinniped_identity_providers is a custom discovery endpoint for clients to learn about available upstream identity providers.
<issuer_path>/oauth2/authorize is the standard OIDC authorize endpoint.
<issuer_path>/oauth2/token is the standard OIDC token endpoint. The token endpoint can handle the standard OIDC authorization_code and refresh_token grant types, and has also been extended to handle an additional grant type for RFC 8693 token exchanges to reduce the applicable scope (technically, the aud claim) of ID tokens.
<issuer_path>/callback is a special endpoint that is used as the redirect URL when performing an OAuth 2.0 or OIDC authcode flow against an upstream OIDC identity provider as configured by an OIDCIdentityProvider or GitHubIdentityProvider custom resource.
<issuer_path>/choose_identity_provider is a UI page which allows users to choose which identity provider they would like to use during a browser-based login flow.
<issuer_path>/login is a UI page which prompts for username and password to support the optional browser-based login flow for LDAP and Active Directory identity providers.

Structure of an audit event

Every log line in a Supervisor or Concierge pod log is a JSON object. Only those log lines that include the key-value pair "auditEvent":true are audit events. Other lines are for errors, warnings, and debugging information.

Every line in the pod logs contains the following common keys and values, including audit event log lines:

timestamp, whose value is in UTC time, e.g. 2024-07-10T20:03:26.164470Z
level, which for an audit event will always have the value info
message, which for audit events is effectively the audit event type, whose value will always be one of the messages declared as an enum value in audit_event.go, which is effectively a catalog of all possible audit event types
caller, which is the line of Go code which caused the log
stacktrace, which is only included when the global log level is configured to trace or all, in which case the value shows a full Go stacktrace for the caller

Some audit event log lines may also have the following keys and values, which are specifically designed to help correlate an audit event log line to other logs. The values for these keys are opaque and only used for correlation.

When applicable, audit logs have an auditID which is a unique ID for every HTTP request, to allow multiple lines of audit events to be correlated when they came from a single HTTP request. This auditID is also returned to the client as an HTTP response header to allow for correlation between the request as observed by the client and the logs as observed by the administrator. Only for TokenCredendtialRequest and OIDCClientSecretRequest, the auditID can also be used to correlate Pinniped audit events with Kubernetes audit logs, which will use the same auditID value for a particular request.
When applicable, audit logs have a sessionID which is the unique ID of a stored Pinniped Supervisor user session, to allow audit events to be correlated which relate to a single session even when they are caused by different HTTP requests or controllers. The same sessionID can help you observe all the actions performed during a single user’s session across multiple HTTP requests that make up a login, token exchanges, session refreshes, and session expiration (garbage collection).
When applicable, audit logs have an authorizeID which is a unique ID to allow audit events to be correlated across some of the browser redirects which relate to a single login attempt by an end user. This is only applicable to those browser-based login flows which use redirects to identity providers and/or interstitial pages in the login flow.
When applicable, audit logs have a tokenID which is a unique ID of a token to allow audit events to be correlated between where a token is issued to an end user in the Supervisor and where a token is used to gain access to a Kubernetes cluster in the Concierge.

Each audit event may also have more key-value pairs specific to the event’s type.

Configuration options for audit events

Logging of audit events is always enabled. There are two configuration options available:

By default, usernames and group names are not included in the audit events. This is because these names may include personally identifiable information (PII) which you may wish to avoid sending to your pod logs. However, authentication audit logs can be more useful when this information is included, so there is a configuration option to enable it.
By default, the Supervisor does not audit log requests made to the /healthz endpoint, which is used for pod liveness and readiness probes, because it is called so often and it has no behavior other than returning OK.

Both of these can be optionally enabled in the ConfigMaps which hold the pod startup settings for the Supervisor and Concierge deployments. When these ConfigMaps are changed, the corresponding Supervisor or Concierge pods must be restarted for the new settings to be picked up by the pods. You can find these ConfigMaps by looking at which ConfigMap is volume-mounted by the Supervisor or Concierge Deployment.

apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata: # ...
data:
  pinniped.yaml: |
    # ...other settings

    audit:

      # This setting is available in both the Supervisor and Concierge ConfigMaps.
      # When enabled, usernames and group names determined during end-user auth
      # will be audit logged.
      logUsernamesAndGroups: enabled

      # This setting is only available in the Supervisor's ConfigMap.
      # Enables audit logging of the /healthz endpoint.
      logInternalPaths: enabled

Exporting Pinniped audit events off-cluster

There are several tools to help cluster administrators export pod logs off-cluster for safe keeping. Because Pinniped audit events appear in the pod logs, they will be exported along with the rest of the lines in the pod logs. Popular tools, like Fluentbit, allow configuration options that could let you export only the audit event lines, or export the audit event lines separately from the other log lines. This can be achieved by configuring Fluentbit FILTERs to evaluate each Supervisor or Concierge pod log line based on the presence or absence of the "auditEvent":true key-value pair.

Example of audit event logs

The follow example shows several audit event logs from the Supervisor’s pod logs during an end user’s browser-based login using an OIDC identity provider.

For this example, the logUsernamesAndGroups setting is enabled. If it were disabled, all values in the personalInfo maps shown below would be redacted. The pod logs contain one JSON object per line. For readability, we have pretty-printed each line. Also for readability, we have removed the caller key in the example logs below. In the pod logs, every line includes caller and the value identifies the line of code which caused the message to be logged.

The login flow starts with the client calling several discovery endpoints. We will skip showing those audit logs here for brevity.

Next, the client calls the authorize endpoint to start the login flow. A single call to the authorize endpoint causes several audit log events, which can be correlated using the auditID (request ID) to find all logs related to that single HTTPS request. Note that potentially sensitive values such as credentials are automatically redacted in the logs. The logs from the authorize endpoint are shown below.

{
  "level": "info",
  "timestamp": "2024-11-21T17:48:43.566433Z",
  "message": "HTTP Request Received",
  "auditEvent": true,
  "auditID": "2d979b88-0e1e-46d4-8c64-44a0bfa1af17",
  "proto": "HTTP/2.0",
  "method": "GET",
  "host": "example-supervisor.pinniped.dev",
  "serverName": "example-supervisor.pinniped.dev",
  "path": "/oauth2/authorize",
  "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/18.1.1 Safari/605.1.15",
  "remoteAddr": "1.2.3.4:58586"
}
{
  "level": "info",
  "timestamp": "2024-11-21T17:48:43.566519Z",
  "message": "HTTP Request Parameters",
  "auditEvent": true,
  "auditID": "2d979b88-0e1e-46d4-8c64-44a0bfa1af17",
  "params": {
    "access_type": "offline",
    "client_id": "pinniped-cli",
    "code_challenge": "redacted",
    "code_challenge_method": "S256",
    "nonce": "redacted",
    "pinniped_idp_name": "My OIDC IDP",
    "pinniped_idp_type": "oidc",
    "redirect_uri": "http://127.0.0.1:55379/callback",
    "response_mode": "form_post",
    "response_type": "code",
    "scope": "groups offline_access openid pinniped:request-audience username",
    "state": "redacted"
  }
}
{
  "level": "info",
  "timestamp": "2024-11-21T17:48:43.567086Z",
  "message": "HTTP Request Custom Headers Used",
  "auditEvent": true,
  "auditID": "2d979b88-0e1e-46d4-8c64-44a0bfa1af17",
  "Pinniped-Username": false,
  "Pinniped-Password": false
}
{
  "level": "info",
  "timestamp": "2024-11-21T17:48:43.567133Z",
  "message": "Using Upstream IDP",
  "auditEvent": true,
  "auditID": "2d979b88-0e1e-46d4-8c64-44a0bfa1af17",
  "displayName": "My OIDC IDP",
  "resourceName": "my-oidc-provider",
  "resourceUID": "754c1c2f-84a4-4e79-981c-8d8ff9da42df",
  "type": "oidc"
}
{
  "level": "info",
  "timestamp": "2024-11-21T17:48:43.567548Z",
  "message": "Upstream Authorize Redirect",
  "auditEvent": true,
  "auditID": "2d979b88-0e1e-46d4-8c64-44a0bfa1af17",
  "authorizeID": "fe25634e5094b7f74e4666166f1520436d95bbeeea5109744ca5ad163217a08b"
}
{
  "level": "info",
  "timestamp": "2024-11-21T17:48:43.567576Z",
  "message": "HTTP Request Completed",
  "auditEvent": true,
  "auditID": "2d979b88-0e1e-46d4-8c64-44a0bfa1af17",
  "path": "/oauth2/authorize",
  "latency": "1.173084ms",
  "responseStatus": 303,
  "location": "https://example-external-oidc.pinniped.dev/auth?client_id=redacted&code_challenge=redacted&code_challenge_method=redacted&nonce=redacted&redirect_uri=redacted&response_type=redacted&scope=redacted&state=redacted"
}

As shown by the logs above, the authorize endpoint has redirected the user’s browser to the external OIDC identity provider for authentication. After the user authenticates there, the OIDC provider redirects back to the Supervisor’s callback endpoint. The authorizeID can be used to correlate the logs from the original authorize request, shown above, with the logs from this callback request, shown below.

{
  "level": "info",
  "timestamp": "2024-11-21T17:49:07.764567Z",
  "message": "HTTP Request Received",
  "auditEvent": true,
  "auditID": "1697bdfd-ccdc-4f22-9f30-9b9b8acf964a",
  "proto": "HTTP/2.0",
  "method": "GET",
  "host": "example-supervisor.pinniped.dev",
  "serverName": "example-supervisor.pinniped.dev",
  "path": "/callback",
  "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/18.1.1 Safari/605.1.15",
  "remoteAddr": "1.2.3.4:58586"
}
{
  "level": "info",
  "timestamp": "2024-11-21T17:49:07.764626Z",
  "message": "HTTP Request Parameters",
  "auditEvent": true,
  "auditID": "1697bdfd-ccdc-4f22-9f30-9b9b8acf964a",
  "params": {
    "code": "redacted",
    "state": "redacted"
  }
}
{
  "level": "info",
  "timestamp": "2024-11-21T17:49:07.764707Z",
  "message": "AuthorizeID From Parameters",
  "auditEvent": true,
  "auditID": "1697bdfd-ccdc-4f22-9f30-9b9b8acf964a",
  "authorizeID": "fe25634e5094b7f74e4666166f1520436d95bbeeea5109744ca5ad163217a08b"
}
{
  "level": "info",
  "timestamp": "2024-11-21T17:49:07.764734Z",
  "message": "Using Upstream IDP",
  "auditEvent": true,
  "auditID": "1697bdfd-ccdc-4f22-9f30-9b9b8acf964a",
  "displayName": "My OIDC IDP",
  "resourceName": "my-oidc-provider",
  "resourceUID": "754c1c2f-84a4-4e79-981c-8d8ff9da42df",
  "type": "oidc"
}
{
  "level": "info",
  "timestamp": "2024-11-21T17:49:07.775753Z",
  "message": "Identity From Upstream IDP",
  "auditEvent": true,
  "auditID": "1697bdfd-ccdc-4f22-9f30-9b9b8acf964a",
  "personalInfo": {
    "upstreamUsername": "pinny@example.com",
    "upstreamGroups": ["developers", "auditors"]
  },
  "upstreamIDPDisplayName": "My OIDC IDP",
  "upstreamIDPType": "oidc",
  "upstreamIDPResourceName": "my-oidc-provider",
  "upstreamIDPResourceUID": "754c1c2f-84a4-4e79-981c-8d8ff9da42df"
}
{
  "level": "info",
  "timestamp": "2024-11-21T17:49:07.775859Z",
  "message": "Session Started",
  "auditEvent": true,
  "auditID": "1697bdfd-ccdc-4f22-9f30-9b9b8acf964a",
  "sessionID": "316fa17f-2ea3-47fd-b7b0-2b02097d8c87",
  "personalInfo": {
    "username": "pinny@example.com",
    "groups": ["developers", "auditors"],
    "subject": "https://example-external-oidc.pinniped.dev?idpName=My+OIDC+IDP&sub=CiQwNjFkMjNkMS1mZTFlLTQ3NzctOWFlOS01OWNkMTJhYmVhYWESBWxvY2Fs",
    "additionalClaims": {}
  },
  "warnings": []
}
{
  "level": "info",
  "timestamp": "2024-11-21T17:49:07.786155Z",
  "message": "HTTP Request Completed",
  "auditEvent": true,
  "auditID": "1697bdfd-ccdc-4f22-9f30-9b9b8acf964a",
  "path": "/callback",
  "latency": "21.603667ms",
  "responseStatus": 200,
  "location": "no location header"
}

The callback endpoint started a Supervisor session for the user and sent an authorization code to the client. Note that it logged a new unique sessionID for this user session. Next, the client will call the token endpoint to exchange that authorization code for tokens. The requests to the callback endpoint and the token endpoint can be correlated using the sessionID. Additionally, all future activity related to this user session can also be correlated using the sessionID, including session refreshes, token exchanges, and session expiration. The logs from the token endpoint are shown below.

{
  "level": "info",
  "timestamp": "2024-11-21T17:49:11.359739Z",
  "message": "HTTP Request Received",
  "auditEvent": true,
  "auditID": "4effaac3-3f56-4133-9fa8-15104a3022c9",
  "proto": "HTTP/2.0",
  "method": "POST",
  "host": "example-supervisor.pinniped.dev",
  "serverName": "example-supervisor.pinniped.dev",
  "path": "/oauth2/token",
  "userAgent": "pinniped/v0.0.0 (darwin/arm64) kubernetes/$Format",
  "remoteAddr": "1.2.3.4:59420"
}
{
  "level": "info",
  "timestamp": "2024-11-21T17:49:11.359905Z",
  "message": "HTTP Request Parameters",
  "auditEvent": true,
  "auditID": "4effaac3-3f56-4133-9fa8-15104a3022c9",
  "params": {
    "code": "redacted",
    "code_verifier": "redacted",
    "grant_type": "authorization_code",
    "redirect_uri": "http://127.0.0.1:55379/callback"
  }
}
{
  "level": "info",
  "timestamp": "2024-11-21T17:49:11.359954Z",
  "message": "HTTP Request Basic Auth",
  "auditEvent": true,
  "auditID": "4effaac3-3f56-4133-9fa8-15104a3022c9",
  "clientID": "pinniped-cli"
}
{
  "level": "info",
  "timestamp": "2024-11-21T17:49:11.372646Z",
  "message": "Session Found",
  "auditEvent": true,
  "auditID": "4effaac3-3f56-4133-9fa8-15104a3022c9",
  "sessionID": "316fa17f-2ea3-47fd-b7b0-2b02097d8c87"
}
{
  "level": "info",
  "timestamp": "2024-11-21T17:49:11.576172Z",
  "message": "ID Token Issued",
  "auditEvent": true,
  "auditID": "4effaac3-3f56-4133-9fa8-15104a3022c9",
  "sessionID": "316fa17f-2ea3-47fd-b7b0-2b02097d8c87",
  "tokenID": "255b785220fe841e950aaf2f78df167991f2b38d2f0b25cc4449301e91d63913"
}
{
  "level": "info",
  "timestamp": "2024-11-21T17:49:11.576319Z",
  "message": "HTTP Request Completed",
  "auditEvent": true,
  "auditID": "4effaac3-3f56-4133-9fa8-15104a3022c9",
  "path": "/oauth2/token",
  "latency": "216.627292ms",
  "responseStatus": 200,
  "location": "no location header"
}

Next, the token endpoint is called again to request a new ID token with reduced scope which will only work for the target workload cluster (technically, an ID token with a different aud claim). These logs are shown below.

{
  "level": "info",
  "timestamp": "2024-11-21T17:49:11.585635Z",
  "message": "HTTP Request Received",
  "auditEvent": true,
  "auditID": "b49b0a29-b1af-4902-a4fc-bea2c851fcb6",
  "proto": "HTTP/2.0",
  "method": "POST",
  "host": "example-supervisor.pinniped.dev",
  "serverName": "example-supervisor.pinniped.dev",
  "path": "/oauth2/token",
  "userAgent": "pinniped/v0.0.0 (darwin/arm64) kubernetes/$Format",
  "remoteAddr": "1.2.3.4:59420"
}
{
  "level": "info",
  "timestamp": "2024-11-21T17:49:11.585748Z",
  "message": "HTTP Request Parameters",
  "auditEvent": true,
  "auditID": "b49b0a29-b1af-4902-a4fc-bea2c851fcb6",
  "params": {
    "audience": "my-workload-cluster-1f4757da",
    "client_id": "pinniped-cli",
    "grant_type": "urn:ietf:params:oauth:grant-type:token-exchange",
    "requested_token_type": "urn:ietf:params:oauth:token-type:jwt",
    "subject_token": "redacted",
    "subject_token_type": "urn:ietf:params:oauth:token-type:access_token"
  }
}
{
  "level": "info",
  "timestamp": "2024-11-21T17:49:11.766796Z",
  "message": "Session Found",
  "auditEvent": true,
  "auditID": "b49b0a29-b1af-4902-a4fc-bea2c851fcb6",
  "sessionID": "316fa17f-2ea3-47fd-b7b0-2b02097d8c87"
}
{
  "level": "info",
  "timestamp": "2024-11-21T17:49:11.767113Z",
  "message": "ID Token Issued",
  "auditEvent": true,
  "auditID": "b49b0a29-b1af-4902-a4fc-bea2c851fcb6",
  "sessionID": "316fa17f-2ea3-47fd-b7b0-2b02097d8c87",
  "tokenID": "931aabb59f2ecedb1ae9ed1d3c94dd37d169aecce5cbd3dd2096295d3b409720"
}
{
  "level": "info",
  "timestamp": "2024-11-21T17:49:11.767198Z",
  "message": "HTTP Request Completed",
  "auditEvent": true,
  "auditID": "b49b0a29-b1af-4902-a4fc-bea2c851fcb6",
  "path": "/oauth2/token",
  "latency": "181.197416ms",
  "responseStatus": 200,
  "location": "no location header"
}

Note that when the ID token is issued, it prints a tokenID which is a unique identifier for that specific token. Technically, it is a sha256sum of the token. This can be used to cross-reference the usage of this specific token to other systems.

Finally, that ID token is submitted to the workload cluster’s Concierge to get a temporary credential which grants access to that workload cluster. In those logs below, you can see how the tokenID can be used to follow the user’s session to another cluster by following the token. This TokenCredentialRequest endpoint is a Kubernetes API, so the auditID value from the Concierge pod logs will match the auditID value in the Kubernetes audit logs for the same request, allowing them to be correlated.

{
  "level": "info",
  "timestamp": "2024-11-21T17:49:11.783402Z",
  "message": "TokenCredentialRequest Token Received",
  "auditEvent": true,
  "auditID": "6776ad70-b587-4bfd-ae41-74ab5e3e00f5",
  "tokenID": "931aabb59f2ecedb1ae9ed1d3c94dd37d169aecce5cbd3dd2096295d3b409720"
}
{
  "level": "info",
  "timestamp": "2024-11-21T17:49:11.786405Z",
  "message": "TokenCredentialRequest Authenticated User",
  "auditEvent": true,
  "auditID": "6776ad70-b587-4bfd-ae41-74ab5e3e00f5",
  "personalInfo": {
    "username": "pinny@example.com",
    "groups": ["developers", "auditors"]
  },
  "issuedClientCert": {
    "notAfter": "2024-11-21T17:54:11Z",
    "notBefore": "2024-11-21T17:44:11Z"
  },
  "authenticator": {
    "apiGroup": "authentication.concierge.pinniped.dev",
    "kind": "JWTAuthenticator",
    "name": "my-jwt-authenticator"
  }
}

As we’ve seen, a user’s entire authentication journey across clusters can be followed by using the auditID, authorizeID, sessionID, and tokenID correlation values to find related audit log events. The same correlation values could be used to trace a user’s journey both forwards and backwards in time through the logs.

Watching the audit logs

Here is a handy command to watch the audit logs from a Supervisor’s pod logs which pretty-prints the logs and removes keys to make them more terse. A similar command would work for the Concierge’s pod logs.

kubectl logs --follow --selector=app=pinniped-supervisor -n pinniped-supervisor \
  | jq --unbuffered -r '. | select(.auditEvent == true) | del(.caller) | del(.level) | del(.auditEvent)'

End users getting auditIDs

The auditID of each request is returned on an HTTP response header to clients.

If an end user encounters an authentication problem, they can get the auditID of the failed request to share with their Pinniped administrator, who can then search the pod logs to find the audit logs associated with that particular request. This may aid in debugging the problem. The end user can set the environment variable PINNIPED_DEBUG=true while using kubectl and other similar tools with their Pinniped-compatible kubeconfig. The extra console output caused by that environment variable will include the auditID of any failed requests.

Pinniped Documentation

Overview

Background

Tutorials

How-to Guides

Concierge Configuration

Supervisor Configuration

Reference