Barbican is an OpenStack project that provides a REST API for the secure storage, provisioning, and management of secrets across cloud environments. Developed by the Barbican Project Team with support from organizations including Rackspace Hosting, EMC, Ericsson, Johns Hopkins University, HP, Red Hat, and Cisco Systems, the project addresses a significant gap in key management infrastructure, particularly for Linux environments where cohesive secrets management solutions have historically been lacking.
The core functionality of Barbican centers on handling multiple types of secrets. The system manages symmetric keys used for reversible encryption of data at rest, typically employing AES algorithms to enable features like encrypted Swift containers and Cinder volumes. It also handles asymmetric key pairs for scenarios requiring communication between untrusted parties, with common applications including SSL/TLS certificates, SSH keys, S/MIME encryption, and digital signatures. Additionally, Barbican stores raw secrets as base64-encoded encrypted data blocks, allowing clients to store secrets in any format they require. For both symmetric and asymmetric key types, the system provides comprehensive lifecycle management including provisioning, expiration, and reporting capabilities.
The design philosophy behind Barbican reflects five primary goals. First, it aims to provide a central secret store capable of distributing secret and keying material to all deployment types, including ephemeral cloud instances. Second, it supports compliance requirements through reporting and auditability features. Third, the project prioritizes minimal adoption costs for applications. Fourth, it builds community and ecosystem strength through open-source development and extensibility. Fifth, it improves security through sensible defaults and centralized policy management for all secrets, along with out-of-band communication mechanisms to notify and protect sensitive assets.
The repository is written in Python and serves as a mirror of code maintained at opendev.org. GitGenius activity classification indicates this is an actively maintained project spanning multiple security and infrastructure domains including secure communication, secure storage solutions, secrets management, key storage, encryption services, certificate management, cloud security, compliance auditing, access control, identity management, and API integration capabilities. The project maintains comprehensive documentation on the OpenStack Developer Documentation Site, with bug tracking through Launchpad and release notes available through the OpenStack release notes portal. Design specifications and future work are tracked through the OpenStack specs repository.
For developers and operators, Barbican provides the python-barbicanclient library, a Python-based tool for convenient interaction with the Barbican API. The project maintains active community engagement through the OpenStack-discuss mailing list, where discussions include the [barbican] subject tag, and through the IRC channel #openstack-barbican on OFTC. The motivation for Barbican emerged from internal Rackspace requirements and broader OpenStack needs, recognizing that the existing state of key management infrastructure required substantial improvement to meet modern cloud computing demands.
