Is this a Barbican problem or a Keystone one? The inability to restrict a token 
to go only to one service but instead any hacked service can be used to get 
tokens that can be used on any other service seems to to me to be a more 
general Keystone architectural problem to solve?

Thanks,
Kevin
________________________________
From: Duncan Thomas [duncan.tho...@gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, January 17, 2017 6:04 AM
To: OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions)
Subject: Re: [openstack-dev] [all] [barbican] [security] Why are projects 
trying to avoid Barbican, still?



On 17 January 2017 at 13:41, Dave McCowan (dmccowan) 
<dmcco...@cisco.com<mailto:dmcco...@cisco.com>> wrote:

I don't know everything that was proposed in the Juno timeframe, or before, but 
the Nova and Cinder integration has been done now.  The documentation is at 
[1].  A cinder user can create an encryption key through Barbican when creating 
a volume, then the same user (or a user with permissions granted by that user), 
as a nova user, can retrieve that key when mounting the encrypted volume.

Sure, cinder can add a secret and nova can retrieve it. But glance can *also* 
retrieve it. So can trove. And any other service that gets a normal keystone 
token from the user (i.e. just about all of them). This is, for some threat 
models, far worse that the secret being nice and safe int he cinder DB and only 
ever given out to nova via a trusted API path. The original design vision I saw 
for barbican was intended to have much better controls than this, but they 
never showed up AFAIK. And that's just the problem - people think 'Oh, barbican 
is storing the cinder volume secrets, great, we're secure' when actually 
barbican has made the security situation worse not better. It's a pretty 
terrible secrets-as-a-service product at the moment. Fixing it is not trivial.

--
Duncan Thomas
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