Thanks for your review and comments on the blueprint. A few comments / 
clarifications:


*         There are about a half dozen key manager products on the market that 
support KMIP. They are offered in different form factors / price points: some 
are physical appliances (with and without embedded HSMs) and some are software 
implementations.

*         Agreed that there isn't an existing KMIP client in python. We are 
offering to port the needed functionality from our current java KMIP client  to 
python and contribute it to openstack.

*         Good points about the common features that barbican provides. I will 
take a look at the barbican architecture and join discussions there.


Thanks,
Bill


From: Jarret Raim [mailto:jarret.r...@rackspace.com]
Sent: Friday, July 19, 2013 9:46 AM
To: OpenStack Development Mailing List
Subject: Re: [openstack-dev] KMIP client for volume encryption key management

I'm not sure that I agree with this direction. In our investigation, KMIP is a 
problematic protocol for several reasons:

 *   We haven't found an implementation of KMIP for Python. (Let us know if 
there is one!)
 *   Support for KMIP by HSM vendors is limited.
 *   We haven't found software implementations of KMIP suitable for use as an 
HSM replacement. (e.g. Most deployers wanting to use KMIP would have to spend a 
rather large amount of money to purchase HSMs)
 *   From our research, the KMIP spec and implementations seem to lack support 
for multi-tenancy. This makes managing keys for thousands of users difficult or 
impossible.
The goal for the Barbican system is to provide key management for OpenStack. It 
uses the standard interaction mechanisms for OpenStack, namely ReST and JSON. 
We integrate with keystone and will provide common features like usage events, 
role-based access control, fine grained control, policy support, client libs, 
Celiometer support, Horizon support and other things expected of an OpenStack 
service. If every product is forced to implement KMIP, these features would 
most likely not be provided by whatever vendor is used for the Key Manager. 
Additionally, as mentioned in the blueprint, I have concerns that vendor 
specific data will be leaked into the rest of OpenStack for things like key 
identifiers, authentication and the like.

I would propose that rather than each product implement KMIP support, we 
implement KMIP support into Barbican. This will allow the products to speak 
ReST / JSON using our client libraries just like any other OpenStack system and 
Barbican will take care of being a good OpenStack citizen. On the backend, 
Barbican will support the use of KMIP to talk to whatever device the provider 
wishes to deploy. We will also support other interaction mechanisms including 
PKCS through OpenSSH, a development implementation and a fully free and open 
source software implementation. This also allows some advanced uses cases 
including federation. Federation will allow customers of public clouds like 
Rackspace's to maintain custody of their keys while still being able to 
delegate their use to the Cloud for specific tasks.

I've been asked about KMIP support at the Summit and by several of Rackspace's 
partners. I was planning on getting to it at some point, probably after 
Icehouse. This is mostly due to the fact that we didn't find a suitable KMIP 
implementation for Python so it looks like we'd have to write one. If there is 
interest from people to create that implementation, we'd be happy to help do 
the work to integrate it into Barbican.

We just released our M2 milestone and we are on track for our 1.0 release for 
Havana. I would encourage anyone interested to check our what we are working on 
and come help us out. We use this list for most of our discussions and we hang 
out on #openstack-cloudkeep on free node.


Thanks,
Jarret




From: <Becker>, Bill 
<bill.bec...@safenet-inc.com<mailto:bill.bec...@safenet-inc.com>>
Reply-To: OpenStack List 
<openstack-dev@lists.openstack.org<mailto:openstack-dev@lists.openstack.org>>
Date: Thursday, July 18, 2013 2:11 PM
To: OpenStack List 
<openstack-dev@lists.openstack.org<mailto:openstack-dev@lists.openstack.org>>
Subject: [openstack-dev] KMIP client for volume encryption key management

A blueprint and spec to add a client that implements OASIS KMIP standard was 
recently added:

https://blueprints.launchpad.net/nova/+spec/kmip-client-for-volume-encryption
https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/KMIPclient


We're looking for feedback to the set of questions in the spec. Any additional 
input is also appreciated.

Thanks,
Bill B.

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