FAQ

Below is an aggregation of solutions to some issues that cert-manager users may face:

• TLS Terminology, including commonly misused terms
• Troubleshooting issuing ACME certificates
• How to change the Cluster Resource Namespace
• How to sync secrets across namespaces
• Failing to create resources due to Webhook

Certificates

Can I trigger a renewal from cert-manager at will?

This is a feature in cert-manager starting in v0.16 using the cmctl CLI. More information can be found on the renew command's page

Why isn't my root certificate in my issued Secret's tls.crt?

Occasionally, people work with systems which have made a flawed choice regarding TLS chains. The TLS spec has the following section for the "Server Certificate" section of the TLS handshake:

This is a sequence (chain) of certificates. The sender's certificate MUST come first in the list. Each following certificate MUST directly certify the one preceding it. Because certificate validation requires that root keys be distributed independently, the self-signed certificate that specifies the root certificate authority MAY be omitted from the chain, under the assumption that the remote end must already possess it in order to validate it in any case.

In a standard, secure and correctly configured TLS environment, adding a root certificate to the chain is almost always unnecessary and wasteful.

There are two ways that a certificate can be trusted:

• explicitly, by including it in a trust store.
• through a signature, by following the certificate's chain back up to an explicitly trusted certificate.

Crucially, root certificates are by definition self-signed and they cannot be validated through a signature.

As such, if we have a client trying to validate the certificate chain sent by the server, the client must already have the root before the connection is started. If the client already has the root, there was no point in it being sent by the server!

The same logic with not sending root certificates applies for servers trying to validate client certificates; the same justification is given in the TLS RFC.

How can I see all the historic events related to a certificate object?

cert-manager publishes all events to the Kubernetes events mechanism, you can get the events for your specific resources using kubectl describe <resource> <name>.

Due to the nature of the Kubernetes event mechanism these will be purged after a while. If you're using a dedicated logging system it might be able or is already also storing Kubernetes events.

What happens if a renewal doesn't happen? Will it be tried again after some time?

cert-manager will retry renewal if it encounters temporary failures. It uses an exponential backoff algorithm to calculate the delay between each retry.

A temporary failure is one that doesn't mark the CertificateRequest as failed. If the CertificateRequest is marked as failed, issuance will be re-tried in 1 hour.

Is ECC (elliptic-curve cryptography) supported?

cert-manager supports ECDSA key pairs! You can set your certificate to use ECDSA in the privateKey part of your Certificate resource.

For example:

apiVersion: cert-manager.io/v1
kind: Certificate
metadata:
  name: ecdsa
spec:
  secretName: ecdsa-cert
  isCA: false
  privateKey:
    algorithm: ECDSA
    size: 256
  dnsNames:
    - ecdsa.example.com
  issuerRef:
    [...]

If renewBefore or duration is not defined, what will be the default value?

Default duration is 90 days. If renewBefore has not been set, Certificate will be renewed 2/3 through its actual duration.

Miscellaneous

Kubernetes has a builtin CertificateSigningRequest API. Why not use that?

Kubernetes has a Certificate Signing Requests API, and a kubectl certificates command which allows you to approve certificate signing requests and have them signed by the certificate authority (CA) of the Kubernetes cluster.

This API and CLI have occasionally been misused to sign certificates for use by non-control-plane Pods but this is a mistake. For the security of the Kubernetes cluster, it is important to limit access to the Kubernetes certificate authority, and it is important that you do not use that certificate authority to sign certificates which are used outside of the control-plane, because such certificates increase the opportunity for attacks on the Kubernetes API server.

In Kubernetes 1.19 the Certificate Signing Requests API has reached V1 and it can be used more generally by following (or automating) the Request Signing Process.

cert-manager currently has some limited experimental support for this resource.