Several testing environment are available to run scripts and simulate the initialisation/maintenance of an offline CA.

Local testing

On a dev vault server

This avoids running a virtual machine, and is an ephemeral setup (the vault is run as a local process in dev/debug mode).

For this, you will thus need a local working installation of the vault service on your host. This either requires installing the vault service on your host or an easier way is to use the vault server in the provided nix develop shell.

On a dedicated terminal, start a development server:

vault server -dev

All .sh scripts (except the vault initialisation) in templates should be able to run against that server, in a second terminal, once you set the two following environment variables (associated values are displayed on the server console):

VAULT_ADDR
VAULT_TOKEN, set with the root token string, starting with (hvs.)

To double-check that the two above variables are set properly, you can run:

vault status

If a script needs more environment variables, it should tell you.

In a VM

This allows to keep the state of your vault across reboots and is very close to the ephemeral vault setup but skipping the need to create a USB stick. The state (VAULT_WRITABLE partition content) is kept in a generated raw ext4 stored in a local file named orca-testing-disk.raw.

tip

You can loop mount this .raw image if you need to access or modify files.

Starting the iso in a VM

important

Because with a VM, we are very close to the real offline ephemeral vault setup, the orca configuration and actions should reflect what you want to test.

Run with:

chmod go-rwx testing/root_key
nix run .#in-vm

A virtual machine that will boot on the iso image (that was automatically mounted), and with a small disk will start.

note

At the end of your testing session, you'll probably want to delete the backup from the disk. To do so, at the root of O.R.CA, run :

ssh root@localhost -o "UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null" -o "StrictHostKeyChecking=accept-new" -p 2222 -i testing/root_key rm '/var/lib/vault/orca/*.tar'

Simulating a key with a read/write switch

At the very beginning, you have a prompt allowing you to switch the stick to read-write.

You can do in a terminal on the host machine, at the root of the repository, with:

nix develop --command switch-to-readwrite

To switch the "key" to readonly use:

nix develop --command switch-to-readonly

Simulating Hardware Tokens

warning

This is only available if you are using the dev environment-target

While a hardware token should be inserted in real life, in the VM, you can simulate. When asked to plug a hardware token, in a terminal on the host machine, at the root of the repository, run:

nix develop --command plug-simulated-hardware-token <n>

where <n> is the number (1 to 4) of the hardware token you want to insert. Then continue in the VM as in real life. The passphrase for the simulated hardware token is hwtoken

SSH to the VM