Skip to main content

Signing Key

  • Environmental Variable: SIGNING_KEY
  • Config File Key: signing_key
  • Type: base64 encoded string
  • Optional

Signing Key is the private key used to sign a user's attestation JWT which can be consumed by upstream applications to pass along identifying user information like username, id, and groups.

If set, the signing key's public key will can retrieved by hitting Pomerium's /.well-known/pomerium/jwks.json endpoint which lives on the authenticate service. Otherwise, the endpoint will return an empty keyset.

For example, assuming you have generated an ES256 key as follows.

# Generates an P-256 (ES256) signing key
openssl ecparam  -genkey  -name prime256v1  -noout  -out ec_private.pem
# careful! this will output your private key in terminal
cat ec_private.pem | base64

That signing key can be accessed via the well-known jwks endpoint.

curl https://authenticate.int.example.com/.well-known/pomerium/jwks.json | jq
{
  "keys": [
    {
      "use": "sig",
      "kty": "EC",
      "kid": "ccc5bc9d835ff3c8f7075ed4a7510159cf440fd7bf7b517b5caeb1fa419ee6a1",
      "crv": "P-256",
      "alg": "ES256",
      "x": "QCN7adG2AmIK3UdHJvVJkldsUc6XeBRz83Z4rXX8Va4",
      "y": "PI95b-ary66nrvA55TpaiWADq8b3O1CYIbvjqIHpXCY"
    }
  ]
}

If no certificate is specified, one will be generated and the base64'd public key will be added to the logs. Note, however, that this key be unique to each service, ephemeral, and will not be accessible via the authenticate service's jwks_uri endpoint.