Barbican is a ReST API designed for the secure storage, provisioning and management of secrets, including in OpenStack environments.
Go to file
jfwood eb4b711679 Initial connect up retry task submit and re-enqueue
This CR adds the remaining pieces need to allow worker task processing
to add tasks needing retries to the order retry tasks table, and then
to have the periodic task service pick these retry tasks up and enqueue
them for retries. With this initial CR no attempt is made to protect
against concurrency between the existing worker RPC process and the
separate periodic retry scheduler process. A subsequent CR will add
concurrency protection. This CR does allow the retry behavior to be
demonstrated locally as follows: 1) run the 'barbican.sh start', then
2) run the new barbican-worker-retry-scheduler.py script, then 3)
POST to the orders resource a 'certificate' type order, and finally
poll this new order until it becomes ACTIVE. The simple certificate
plugin will call for a retry for the status check method after the
initial certificate request is made. The retry processing will
eventually call the plugins status check method, which then produces
a fake certificate.

Change-Id: Idee08abcd3bf2920039f91a7f5b6125eacd1f785
2015-03-30 17:59:45 -05:00
barbican Initial connect up retry task submit and re-enqueue 2015-03-30 17:59:45 -05:00
bin Add retry periodic task and worker-client logic 2015-03-20 16:51:09 -05:00
contrib/devstack Make the default devstack config use the right password 2015-03-18 19:44:41 -05:00
doc/source Removing a forgotten TODO 2015-03-30 14:16:03 -05:00
docs Replace 'tenants' for 'projects' in documentation 2014-12-10 15:39:37 +02:00
etc Initial connect up retry task submit and re-enqueue 2015-03-30 17:59:45 -05:00
functionaltests Initial connect up retry task submit and re-enqueue 2015-03-30 17:59:45 -05:00
rpmbuild Adding keystone notification listener support 2014-10-07 16:09:09 -07:00
.coveragerc Add I18n-related unit tests (Part 3) 2015-01-05 16:41:08 -06:00
.gitignore hide the eggs 2015-03-11 18:23:00 +00:00
.gitreview Update .gitreview file for new repo name 2014-05-23 18:14:46 -04:00
.mailmap Add .mailmap file 2013-12-02 11:23:23 -05:00
.testr.conf Modifying testr conf to suppress output 2014-09-13 15:12:58 -05:00
apiary.apib Add missing \n at the end of file 2014-10-09 22:11:23 +02:00
babel.cfg Merge of previous project work into this project 2013-04-01 18:26:03 -05:00
config.py Fixed PEP8 violations 2013-04-08 19:07:17 -05:00
HACKING.rst Deduplicate HACKING.rst with docs.openstack.org/developer/hacking/ 2014-09-24 14:35:44 -07:00
LICENSE Merge of previous project work into this project 2013-04-01 18:26:03 -05:00
MANIFEST.in Removed README.rst in favor of README.md 2013-11-15 13:31:22 -06:00
openstack-common.conf Add retry periodic task and worker-client logic 2015-03-20 16:51:09 -05:00
pylintrc Merge of previous project work into this project 2013-04-01 18:26:03 -05:00
README.md Update README file 2015-03-17 01:50:12 -05:00
requirements.txt Updated from global requirements 2015-03-23 17:05:04 +00:00
setup.cfg Drop Python 2.6 support 2015-01-23 12:35:05 +01:00
setup.py Update to the latest global requirements versions 2014-10-06 10:53:48 -05:00
test-requirements.txt Fix pep8 gate errors 2015-03-23 18:15:15 -05:00
tox.ini Upping process-timeout and fixing posargs in tox.ini 2015-03-12 13:29:03 -05:00

Barbican

Barbican is a REST API designed for the secure storage, provisioning and management of secrets. It is aimed at being useful for all environments, including large ephemeral Clouds.

Barbican is an OpenStack project developed by the Barbican Project Team with support from Rackspace Hosting, EMC, Ericsson, Johns Hopkins University, HP, Red Hat, Cisco Systems, and many more.

The full documentation can be found on the Barbican Developer Documentation Site.

If you have a technical question, you can ask it at Ask OpenStack with the barbican tag, or you can send an email to the OpenStack General mailing list at openstack@lists.openstack.org with the prefix [barbican] in the subject.

To file a bug, use our bug tracker on Launchpad.

For development questions or discussion, hop on the OpenStack-dev mailing list at openstack-dev@lists.openstack.org and let us know what you think, just add [barbican] to the subject. You can also join our IRC channel #openstack-barbican on Freenode.

Barbican began as part of a set of applications that make up the CloudKeep ecosystem. The other systems are:

  • Postern - Go based agent that provides access to secrets from the Barbican API.
  • Palisade - AngularJS based web ui for the Barbican API.
  • Python-barbicanclient - A convenient Python-based library to interact with the Barbican API.

Getting Started

Please visit our Getting Started wiki page for details.

Why Should You Use Barbican?

The current state of key management is atrocious. While Windows does have some decent options through the use of the Data Protection API (DPAPI) and Active Directory, Linux lacks a cohesive story around how to manage keys for application use.

Barbican was designed to solve this problem. The system was motivated by internal Rackspace needs, requirements from OpenStack and a realization that the current state of the art could use some help.

Barbican will handle many types of secrets, including:

  • Symmetric Keys - Used to perform reversible encryption of data at rest, typically using the AES algorithm set. This type of key is required to enable features like encrypted Swift containers and Cinder volumes, encrypted Cloud Backups, etc.
  • Asymmetric Keys - Asymmetric key pairs (sometimes referred to as public / private keys) are used in many scenarios where communication between untrusted parties is desired. The most common case is with SSL/TLS certificates, but also is used in solutions like SSH keys, S/MIME (mail) encryption and digital signatures.
  • Raw Secrets - Barbican stores secrets as a base64 encoded block of data (encrypted, naturally). Clients can use the API to store any secrets in any format they desire. The Postern agent is capable of presenting these secrets in various formats to ease integration.

For the symmetric and asymmetric key types, Barbican supports full life cycle management including provisioning, expiration, reporting, etc. A plugin system allows for multiple certificate authority support (including public and private CAs).

Design Goals

  1. Provide a central secret-store capable of distributing secret / keying material to all types of deployments including ephemeral Cloud instances.
  2. Support reasonable compliance regimes through reporting and auditability.
  3. Application adoption costs should be minimal or non-existent.
  4. Build a community and ecosystem by being open-source and extensible.
  5. Improve security through sane defaults and centralized management of policies for all secrets.
  6. Out of band communication mechanism to notify and protect sensitive assets.