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# 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
](https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Barbican) with support from
[Rackspace Hosting](http://www.rackspace.com/), 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](http://docs.openstack.org/developer/barbican/).
If you have a technical question, you can ask it at [Ask OpenStack](
https://ask.openstack.org/en/questions/) with the `barbican` tag, or you can
send an email to the [OpenStack General mailing list](
http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack/) at
`openstack@lists.openstack.org` with the prefix `[barbican]` in the
subject.
To file a bug, use our bug tracker on [Launchpad](
https://bugs.launchpad.net/barbican/).
For development questions or discussion, hop on the [OpenStack-dev mailing list
](http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/)
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](https://github.com/cloudkeep/postern) - Go based agent that
provides access to secrets from the Barbican API.
* [Palisade](https://github.com/cloudkeep/palisade) - AngularJS based web ui
for the Barbican API.
* [Python-barbicanclient](https://github.com/openstack/python-barbicanclient) -
A convenient Python-based library to interact with the Barbican API.
## Getting Started
Please visit our [Getting Started wiki page
](https://github.com/cloudkeep/barbican/wiki/Barbican-Getting-Started-Guide)
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](http://www.openstack.org/) 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](http://www.openstack.org/software/openstack-storage/), [encrypted
Cloud Backups](http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/backup/), etc.
* **Asymmetric Keys** - Asymmetric key pairs (sometimes referred to as [public
/ private keys](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography)) 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](https://github.com/cloudkeep/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](https://github.com/cloudkeep/barbican/wiki/Policies).
6. Provide an out of band communication mechanism to notify and protect sensitive
assets.
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