chown init-container should run as non-root

[unique-dominik]

We are very happy users of Zitadel and we use it in heavily regulated environments (financial services industry). Some of these environments forbid the usage of root users (also for init containers), e.g. via Gatekeeper I believe.

Meta

Chart version: latest Related Discord discussion: Ref

Problem

The init container chown that changes the ownership of the secret directories to 1000:1000 uses root privileges. https://github.com/zitadel/zitadel-charts/blob/bcfdd4f8306de34cb7869f0d7204fdb97a9d54f3/charts/zitadel/templates/deployment.yaml#L190

Potential solutions

Configure volume permission and ownership change policy for Pods

Use Configure volume permission and ownership change policy for Pods to let the chart consumer decide, which user:group they want to use for the secrets and zitadel itself.

In fact, it would maybe even be smart to reuse the same podSecurityContext for all containers but I am no Security Context expert.

Do not change any ownership

There also the option to try and not change the ownership anymore and see how it goes.

Known constraints

@eliobischof Already mentioned, that this might be due to older k8s versions not being able to mount volumes/files with correct ownership. It is to be seen if a change to the chart would break its backward compatibility.

The same should apply to all init containers, so namely also the generate-self-signed-cert. This does not run as root though but uses a hardcoded 1000:1000 which could limit someone else somewhere else.

I also see that the chart basically allows any context: https://github.com/zitadel/zitadel-charts/blob/bcfdd4f8306de34cb7869f0d7204fdb97a9d54f3/charts/zitadel/templates/deployment.yaml#L38C7-L38C16

Which could lead to new ownership problems again if you run chown as 2000:2000 and zitadel itself as 1000:1000 wouldn't we have the same ownership issue again?

Help

I can contribute a PR but my key issue right now is not even time; it's I do literally not know how one would solve that 🤣 I mean I can add the PSC but then I might just break everyone else's Zitadel since I have no clue what I am doing. Maybe it needs a major version chart bump.

Sidenote

By the way this week we will need to use custom certificates for the customers setup which will certainly lead to us using secerts, which will force us to run the init container which in turn will force me to fork the chart for the time being 😢 But good note is: I can then contribute the change as I can live test the podSecurityContext or what ever you might tell me here 🚀

[unique-dominik]

Alright, we can no longer wait. I will fork the chart and come back with a PR if we ever make it work 🤣

[eliobischof]

@unique-dominik I would be glad if you could open a draft PR with something that works for you. I can then take it over and ensure compatibility and stuff if you don't mind?

[unique-dominik]

Here I do not have a solution yet as I am overasked by what the container tries to solve 🤣 I just did this for now: https://github.com/zitadel/zitadel-charts/issues/178#issuecomment-1980905482

[bpow]

I'm looking into this, too, from the standpoint of wanting to run on kubernetes clusters where runAsNonRoot: false is not permitted.

I'm definitely no k8s security expert, but it seems to me that using an appropriate securityContext here should allow the files to have the correct ownership, from the statement:

By default, Kubernetes recursively changes ownership and permissions for the contents of each volume to match the fsGroup specified in a Pod's securityContext when that volume is mounted.

(from Configure volume permission and ownership change policy for Pods)

There is a long-standing issues in kubernetes of defaultMode not being fully set when using runAsUser, but I think that bringing those files to an emptyDir volume, with current context, should allow specific user/group from the securityContext and which ever mode we want. From what I can tell, this is how things were handled in the bitnami postgresql chart.