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Excerpts from Dave McCowan (dmccowan)'s message of 2017-01-18 15:58:19 +0000:
> 
> On Mon, Jan 16, 2017 at 7:35 AM, Ian Cordasco <sigmavirus24 at gmail.com<mailto:sigmavirus24 at gmail.com>> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I've seen a few nascent projects wanting to implement their own secret
> storage to either replace Barbican or avoid adding a dependency on it.
> When I've pressed the developers on this point, the only answer I've
> received is to make the operator's lives simpler.
> 
> 
> This is my opinion, but I'd like to see Keystone use Barbican for storing credentials. It hasn't happened yet because nobody's had the time or inclination (what we have works). If this happened, we could deprecate the current way of storing credentials and require Barbican in a couple of releases. Then Barbican would be a required service. The Barbican team might find this to be the easiest route towards convincing other projects to also use Barbican.
> 
> - Brant
> 
> Can you provides some details on how you'd see this work?
> Since Barbican typically uses Keystone to authenticate users before determining which secrets they have access to, this leads to a circular logic.
> 
> Barbican's main purpose is a secret manager.  It supports a variety of RBAC and ACL access control methods to determine if a request to read/write/delete a secret should be allowed or not.  For secret storage, Barbican itself needs a secure backend for storage.  There is a customizable plugin interface to access secure storage.  The current implementations can support a database with encryption, an HSM via KMIP, and Dogtag.

Just bootstrap the genesis admin credentials into Barbican and Keystone
the same way we bootstrap them into Keystone now. Once there's admin
creds, they can be validated separate from updating them, and there's
no circle anymore, Just two one-way dependencies.