abd65a1e50
By default barbican checks only the algorithm and the bit_length when creating a new secret. The xts-mode cuts the key in half for aes, so for using aes-256 with xts, you have to use a 512 bit key, but barbican allows only a maximum of 256 bit. For this reason, it was necessary to add a check for the mode within the _is_algorithm_supported method of the class SimpleCryptoPlugin. When mode xts is set, it now checks, if the half of the key-length is in the list of supported bit-length. So when using xts-mode, 512 bit keys are now supported, but 64 bit keys are not because they would result in a 32 bit aes key, which would be too short. Maybe there are other modes too, which change the effective key-length, so the new length_factor was added, to make it easier to add other modes like xts too. In the future their could be a list of supported modes together with its key changing factor. Change-Id: I4dc552587391ad2245ee2fdfa20ce178da2efbe0 Story: 2002612
Team and repository tags
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 OpenStack Storyboard.
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 Users, Developers and Operators documentation 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.