
Currently barbican provides hostname part of hrefs returned in response based on host_href value defined in barbican.conf. This approach would not work if barbican API needs to be accessed via public or internal endpoint as they can be different endpoints in control planes. The endpoint used by client depends on which network client is making the API request. For same reasons, keystone also allows different endpoint for a service to expose as public or internal interface in service catalog. To allow that kind of deployment model for barbican service, now enhancing its logic to derive this hostname (http_scheme+host+port) information from wsgi requests when host_href value is not set in barbican.conf. So deployment requiring this behavior can leave host_href blank in their barbican.conf. The host_href needs to be set empty as not setting it results in default. Generally in this kind of deployment, proxy (e.g. haproxy) will set appropriate host, http scheme header. Request url received at barbican side will have the client IP address and scheme inserted directly inside it. Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Forwarded-For Updated existing 'change host header' related functional test to skip when host_href is not set in barbican server side. Added new functional tests when hrefs are derived from wsgi request. New tests are skipped when host_href is set at server side. Added a flag in barbican-functional.conf to indicate barbican server setting Default is to use CONF.host_href value. Explicit flag is added as functional test setup may not always have barbican server conf available locally. Change-Id: Idb8e62867f6cbd457eb64ea31500e93e74d247ea Closes-Bug: 1541118
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
- Provide a central secret-store capable of distributing secret / keying material to all types of deployments including ephemeral Cloud instances.
- Support reasonable compliance regimes through reporting and auditability.
- Application adoption costs should be minimal or non-existent.
- Build a community and ecosystem by being open-source and extensible.
- Improve security through sane defaults and centralized management of policies for all secrets.
- Provide an out of band communication mechanism to notify and protect sensitive assets.