openbao/openbao

OpenBao

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Please note: We take OpenBao's security and our users' trust very seriously. If you believe you have found a security issue in OpenBao, _please responsibly disclose_ by contacting us at [email protected].

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• Website
• Mailing List
• GitHub Discussions
• Chat Server
• #openssf-openbao-discussion
• #openssf-openbao-support
• #openssf-openbao-tsc
• Working Groups:
• #openssf-openbao-wg
• #openssf-openbao-wg-namespaces
• #openssf-openbao-wg-pkcs11
• #openssf-openbao-wg-scalability
• #openssf-openbao-wg-supply
• #openssf-openbao-wg-ui

OpenBao is a software solution to manage, store, and distribute sensitive data including secrets, certificates, and keys. The OpenBao community intends to provide this software under an OSI-approved open-source license, led by a community run under open-governance principles.

A modern system requires access to a multitude of secrets: database credentials, API keys for external services, credentials for service-oriented architecture communication, etc. Understanding who is accessing what secrets is already very difficult and platform-specific. Adding on key rolling, secure storage, and detailed audit logs is almost impossible without a custom solution. This is where OpenBao steps in.

The key features of OpenBao are:

• Secure Secret Storage: Arbitrary key/value secrets can be stored in

OpenBao. OpenBao encrypts these secrets prior to writing them to persistent storage, so gaining access to the raw storage isn't enough to access your secrets. OpenBao can write to disk, PostgreSQL, and more.

• Dynamic Secrets: OpenBao can generate secrets on-demand for some systems,

such as AWS or SQL databases. For example, when an application needs to access an S3 bucket, it asks OpenBao for credentials, and OpenBao will generate an AWS keypair with valid permissions on demand. After creating these dynamic secrets, OpenBao will also automatically revoke them after the lease is up.

• Data Encryption: OpenBao can encrypt and decrypt data without storing it.

This allows security teams to define encryption parameters and developers to store encrypted data in a location such as a SQL database without having to design their own encryption methods.

• Leasing and Renewal: All secrets in OpenBao have a _lease_ associated with

them. At the end of the lease, OpenBao will automatically revoke that secret. Clients are able to renew leases via built-in renew APIs.

• Revocation: OpenBao has built-in support for secret revocation. OpenBao

can revoke not only single secrets, but a tree of secrets, for example, all secrets read by a specific user, or all secrets of a particular type. Revocation assists in key rolling as well as locking down systems in the case of an intrusion.

Documentation and Getting Started

Documentation is available on the OpenBao website.

Developing OpenBao

[!WARNING]

Before submitting pull requests to OpenBao, ensure that you have

read and understood our contribution guidelines described in

CONTRIBUTING.md. A failure to do so will likely result

in your pull request being rejected.

If you wish to work on OpenBao itself or any of its built-in systems, you'll first need Go installed on your machine. The Go toolchain version used in CI and releases is pinned at .go-version, but using the latest toolchain available for local development is typically fine.

OpenBao uses Go Modules, so it is recommended that you clone the repository outside of the GOPATH.

To build a bao binary:

$ mkdir -p bin
$ go build -o bin/bao .

To run the OpenBao server in development mode:

$ go run . server -dev # Or ./bin/bao server -dev if you've built the binary already.

Since OpenBao is a large codebase that takes a short while to compile from a cold cache, it is useful to attach the -v flag to build commands to get a better sense of compilation progress.

To test a package:

$ go test ./some/package

Some additional notes on development:

• There is also a Makefile available for advanced build

configurations and maintenance tasks. It is not required to build, run & debug OpenBao in most cases, but is worth a look.

• This repository also houses OpenBao's website and documentation page

just as OpenBao's web UI application under the website and ui subtrees respectively. Development instructions are available at website/README.md and ui/README.md.

Importing OpenBao

This repository publishes two libraries that may be imported by other projects: github.com/openbao/openbao/api/v2 and github.com/openbao/openbao/sdk/v2.

Note that this repository also contains OpenBao (the application), and as with most Go projects, OpenBao uses Go modules to manage its dependencies. The mechanism to do that is the go.mod file. As it happens, the presence of that file also makes it theoretically possible to import OpenBao as a dependency into other projects. Some other projects have made a practice of doing so in order to take advantage of testing tooling that was developed for testing OpenBao itself. This is NOT, and has NEVER been, a supported way to use the OpenBao project. We will not fix bugs relating to failure to import github.com/openbao/openbao into your project or refactor internal code to make this easier to do.