AccuKnox

Knox is a secret management service. Knox is a service for storing and rotation of secrets, keys, and passwords used by other services. Pinterest has a plethora of keys or secrets doing things like signing cookies, encrypting data, protecting our network via TLS, accessing our AWS machines, communicating with our third parties, and many more. If these keys become compromised, rotating (or changing our keys) used to be a difficult process generally involving a deploy and likely a code change. Keys/secrets within Pinterest were stored in git repositories. This means they were copied all over our company's infrastructure and present on many of our employees laptops. There was no way to audit who accessed or who has access to the keys. Knox was built to solve these problems. Ease of use for developers to access/use confidential secrets, keys, and credentials. Confidentiality for secrets, keys, and credentials. Provide mechanisms for key rotation in case of compromise.

The Knox API Gateway is designed as a reverse proxy with consideration for pluggability in the areas of policy enforcement, through providers and the backend services for which it proxies requests. Policy enforcement ranges from authentication/federation, authorization, audit, dispatch, hostmapping and content rewrite rules. Policy is enforced through a chain of providers that are defined within the topology deployment descriptor for each Apache Hadoop cluster gated by Knox. The cluster definition is also defined within the topology deployment descriptor and provides the Knox Gateway with the layout of the cluster for purposes of routing and translation between user facing URLs and cluster internals. Each Apache Hadoop cluster that is protected by Knox has its set of REST APIs represented by a single cluster specific application context path. This allows the Knox Gateway to both protect multiple clusters and present the REST API consumer with a single endpoint.