Automate password rotation with GitHub and Azure (Part 2)

It’s that time of year again, time for Azure Spring Clean.

Firstly a big thanks and a shout out to the event organizers Joe Carlyle and Thomas Thornton for featuring my contribution on this years Azure Spring Clean 2022.

Live Recording

See the following youtube video for a live demo recording of my talk.

Overview

Welcome to part 2 of my series on automating password rotation. A few months ago I published a tutorial on how to automate password rotation using a GitHub Action workflow and an Azure key vault. Due to the popularity of that post I decided to create a public GitHub Action on the GitHub Actions marketplace for anyone to use in their own environments.

In this second part of the series I will discuss how to make use of the public marketplace action. For a full in depth understanding on the concepts I am using I would recommend going through Part 1 first.

• Link to GitHub Action on the public marketplace: Rotate AZURE Virtual Machine Passwords.

• Link to my public GitHub repository hosting this action: GitHub Repository.

Concept

This Action will connect to a provided AZURE key vault as input and will loop through each secret key (server name). For each server, automatically generate a random unique password (default 24char), set that password against the VM and save the password value against the relevant secret key in the key vault. This will allow you to automate, maintain and manage all your server passwords from a centrally managed key vault in AZURE by only giving relevant access when required by anyone via key vault permissions.

• The Azure key vault must be pre-populated with Secret Keys, where each key represents a server name:

You can use the AzurePreReqs script to create a key vault, generate a GitHub Secret to use as AZURE_CREDENTIALS and sets relevant RBAC access on the key vault, Key Vault Officer, as well as Virtual Machine Contributor over virtual machines in the Azure subscription.

See Part 1 of this series on setting up the Azure key vault and GitHub Secret Credential (if needed).

GitHub Action Inputs

INSTALLATION

Copy and paste the following snippet into your .yml file.

- name: Rotate VMs administrator passwords
    uses: Pwd9000-ML/azure-vm-password-rotate@v1.1.0
    with:
      key-vault-name: ${{ env.KEY_VAULT_NAME }}
      password-length: 24 ##Optional configuration

Example Usage

Here is a link to an example workflow file

Example - Rotate VM Passwords every monday at 09:00 UTC

name: Update Azure VM passwords
on:
  workflow_dispatch:
  schedule:
    - cron: '0 9 * * 1' ##Runs at 9AM UTC every Monday##

jobs:
  publish:
    runs-on: windows-latest
    env:
      KEY_VAULT_NAME: 'your-key-vault-name'

    steps:
      - name: Check out repository
        uses: actions/checkout@v3.6.0

      - name: Log into Azure using github secret AZURE_CREDENTIALS
        uses: Azure/login@v1
        with:
          creds: ${{ secrets.AZURE_CREDENTIALS }}
          enable-AzPSSession: true

      - name: Rotate VMs administrator passwords
        uses: Pwd9000-ML/azure-vm-password-rotate@v1.1.0
        with:
          key-vault-name: ${{ env.KEY_VAULT_NAME }}

Notes

• As per the example above, you also need a GitHub Secret AZURE_CREDENTIALS to log into Azure using Action: Azure/login@v1

• You can use the AzurePreReqs script to create a key vault, generate a GitHub Secret to use as AZURE_CREDENTIALS and sets relevant RBAC access on the key vault, Key Vault Officer, as well as Virtual Machine Contributor over virtual machines in the Azure subscription.

• Passwords will only be rotated for secrets/names of servers populated in the key vault as secret keys. Only virtual machines that are in a running state will have their passwords rotated:

• Servers will be skipped if they are not running:

• If a server does not exist or the GitHub Secret AZURE_CREDENTIALS does not have access over the Virtual Machine a warning is issued of 'VM NOT found':

• DO NOT populate the key vault with servers that act as Domain Controllers.

Versions of runner that can be used

As of release v1.1.0; Support for linux and windows runner types now available.

I hope you have enjoyed this post and have learned something new. You can also find the code samples used in this blog post on my published GitHub Action page. ❤️

Author

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Marcel.LFollow

Dual Microsoft MVP DevOps + Azure | DevOps Architect | Technical speaker focused on Microsoft technologies, IaC and automation in Azure. Find me on GitHub: https://github.com/Pwd9000-ML