[openstack-dev] [murano][barbican] Encrypting sensitive properties

Paul Bourke paul.bourke at oracle.com
Thu May 25 15:49:00 UTC 2017


Hi all,

I've been looking at a blueprint[0] logged for Murano which involves 
encrypting parts of the object model stored in the database that may 
contain passwords or sensitive information.

I wanted to see if people had any thoughts or preferences on how this 
should be done. On the face of it, it seems Barbican is a good choice 
for solving this, and have read a lengthy discussion around this on the 
mailing list from earlier this year[1]. Overall the benefits of Barbican 
seem to be that we can handle the encryption and management of secrets 
in a common and standard way, and avoid having to implement and maintain 
this ourselves. The main drawback for Barbican seems to be that we 
impose another service dependency on the operator, though this complaint 
seems to be in some way appeased by Castellan, which offers alternative 
backends to just Barbican (though unsure right now what those are?). The 
alternative to integrating Barbican/Castellan is to use a more 
lightweight "roll your own" encryption such as what Glance is using[2].

After we decide on how we want to implement the encryption there is also 
the question of how best to expose this feature to users. My current 
thought is that we can use Murano attributes, so application authors can 
do something like this:

- name: appPassword
   type: password
   encrypt: true

This would of course be transparent to the end user of the application. 
Any thoughts on both issues are very welcome, I hope to have a prototype 
in the next few days which may help solidify this also.

Regards,
-Paul.

[0] 
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/murano/+spec/allow-encrypting-of-muranopl-properties
[1] 
http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2017-January/110192.html
[2] 
https://github.com/openstack/glance/blob/48ee8ef4793ed40397613193f09872f474c11abe/glance/common/crypt.py



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