A major concern about several encryption features within Nova [1, 2] has been 
the lack of secure key management. To address this concern, work has been 
underway to integrate these features with Barbican [3], which can be used to 
manage encryption keys across OpenStack.

We request a feature freeze exception be granted to merge this code [3], which 
is really a shim between the existing key manager interface in Nova and 
python-barbicanclient, into Nova [4]. The acceptance of this feature will 
improve the security of cloud users and operators who use the Cinder volume 
encryption feature [1], which is currently limited to a single, static 
encryption key for volumes. Cinder has already merged a similar feature [5] 
following the review of several patch revisions; not accepting the feature in 
Nova creates a disparity with Cinder in regards to the management of encryption 
keys.

As this is an optional feature that introduces very few changes to pre-existing 
code, the risk of disruption to existing deployments as well as the risk of 
regression is minimal. The only objection that has very recently been voiced is 
the implicit dependency on the Barbican service, which does not yet have 
experimental jobs in Tempest. Other core reviewers, though, believe that the 
existing unit tests included with the change are sufficient.

Thank you for taking the time to consider this request.

The APL Development Team

[1] https://blueprints.launchpad.net/nova/+spec/encrypt-cinder-volumes
[2] https://blueprints.launchpad.net/nova/+spec/lvm-ephemeral-storage-encryption
[3] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/104001/
[4] https://blueprints.launchpad.net/nova/+spec/encryption-with-barbican
[5] https://blueprints.launchpad.net/cinder/+spec/encryption-with-barbican


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