OpenBao: Securing the Future of Open Source Secrets Management
veröffentlicht am 28.07.2025 von Max Körbächer
In today's complex technological landscape, managing secrets—API keys, passwords, certificates, and other sensitive data—has become one of the most critical challenges facing organizations. Therefore, Liquid Reply supports OpenBao, an open source identity-based secrets and encryption management to secure data management in the cloud-native era.
What is OpenBao?
OpenBao is an identity-based secrets and encryption management system. A secret is anything that you want to tightly control access to, such as API encryption keys, passwords, and certificates. OpenBao provides encryption services that are gated by authentication and authorization methods.
Originally forked from HashiCorp Vault, OpenBao has evolved into a community-driven project that addresses the growing need for secure, scalable, and transparent secrets management in open source environments. The platform enables organizations to centrally manage all their credentials, reducing the security risks associated with credential sprawl across multiple systems and applications.
The OpenBao Approach: Authentication, Authorization, and Access
OpenBao operates on a simple yet powerful principle: OpenBao validates and authorizes clients (users, machines, apps) before providing them access to secrets or stored sensitive data.
The system works through a four-stage workflow:
- Authenticate: Clients provide information to verify their identity against trusted authentication methods.
- Validation: OpenBao validates clients against third-party sources like GitHub, LDAP, or AppRole.
- Authorize: Clients are matched against security policies that define what resources they can access.
Access: Based on successful authentication and authorization, OpenBao issues tokens that enable access to specific secrets and capabilities.
Source: https://openbao.org/docs/what-is-openbao/
Key Features of OpenBao
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.
Dynamic Secrets
Rather than storing static credentials, OpenBao can generate secrets on-demand for systems like Kubernetes or SQL databases. These dynamic secrets are automatically revoked when their lease expires, significantly reducing the window of exposure.
Data Encryption
OpenBao provides encryption as a service with centralized key management simplifying both in-transit and at-rest data encryption. As encryption within the OpenBao environment is managed by the OpenBao security team, developers can focus solely on application logic.
Comprehensive Audit Trail
Every action in OpenBao is logged, providing detailed audit trails essential for compliance and incident response.
Leases and Renewal System
All secrets created in OpenBao have a lease associated with them. Upon expiration of a lease, the system automatically revokes the secret, creating a safeguard against potential security vulnerabilities and unauthorized access.
Secrets Trail and Revocation
OpenBao has built-in support for secret revocation, supporting not only revocation of a single secrets, but a tree of secrets, for example all secrets read by a specific user, or all secrets of a particular type, enabling rapid response to potential incidents.
A Major Milestone: Joining the OpenSSF
In a significant development for the project, OpenBao has joined the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) as a newly accepted sandbox project. This move represents a strategic alignment with the broader open source security community.
"Joining OpenSSF has been a dream come true," said Alex Scheel, Chair of the OpenBao Technical Steering Committee. The transition from LF Edge to OpenSSF reflects the project's evolution and its commitment to serving the needs of security professionals and open source maintainers.
This new partnership positions OpenBao to collaborate with various OpenSSF working groups and special interest groups, particularly in strengthening secrets management best practices across open source projects.
Latest Release - Namespaces: Enabling True Multi-Tenancy
One of OpenBao's latest features is its recently announced Namespaces capability. Namespaces in OpenBao are logical partitions within a single OpenBao instance, functioning as isolated environments where teams, organizations, or applications can operate independently.
Why Namespaces Matter
Strong isolation between teams, business units, or tenants becomes critical as organizations scale, especially when handling sensitive data. Namespaces enable:
- Secure Multi-tenancy: Each tenant operates within its own isolated namespace with strictly scoped permissions
- Delegated Administration: Namespace admins can manage their own policies, secret engines, and authentication methods
Self-Service Capabilities: Reduces the burden on cluster-level operators while empowering teams
An example namespace structure to separate tenants and the platform team.
Future Outlook
The Path to Horizontal Scalability
Namespaces represent the first step in OpenBao's journey toward horizontal scalability. The vision includes supporting lazy loading of namespaces and mounts, allowing clusters to efficiently serve workloads with many infrequently accessed resources.
Road towards Secure Self-Managed Multi-Tenancy
Per-namespace sealing mechanism will provide a more robust and flexible multi-tenancy solution, offering tenants higher control over their data security and availability within OpenBao ecosystem.
Declarative Self-Initialization and Profiles
Declarative self-initialization is a new feature that enables automatic configuration during first startup through a flexible profiles system. This advancement eliminates manual initialization steps and enables fully automated deployments in modern infrastructure as a code environments.
The Profiles System
At the core of this feature is a new profiles system, which provides a framework for cross-plugin communication and request orchestration. The profiles system processes configuration blocks into structured API requests, supporting dynamic data sources and request chaining for complex initialization workflows. The system implements the request/response pattern, supporting chained operations and accepting request handlers and parsed profile configurations. In this workflow, the input can be one of the following types: value, environment variable, file, request, or response.
Key Components:
- Configuration Parser: Processes HCL configuration blocks into executable requests
- Source Builders: Handle dynamic data from environment variables, files, and previous responses
- Request Handler: Executes templated requests against internal APIs
- History Manager: Enables data flow between sequential operations and keep logs.
Liquid Reply's Contribution to OpenBao
As a leading cloud-native transformation expert, Liquid Reply has started to do significant contributions to the OpenBao project, particularly in the development of the Namespaces feature.
This contribution aligns with Liquid Reply's expertise in platform engineering and cloud-native development. As specialists in multi- and hybrid-cloud solutions, we understand the critical importance of robust secrets management in complex distributed systems. Our involvement in OpenBao reflects our commitment to advancing open source security tools that enable organizations to embrace cloud-native transformations confidently.
Our Commitment to Open Source Security
Liquid Reply's contribution to OpenBao is part of our broader commitment to the open source community. As a company that helps organizations navigate complex cloud-native transformations, we recognize the vital role that secure, scalable secrets management plays in modern infrastructure.
Our expertise in Kubernetes, site reliability engineering, and operational enablement makes us well-positioned to contribute to projects like OpenBao that form the foundation of secure cloud-native operations.
Europe’s Pledge
The development of OpenBao is partially funded by the IPCEI-CIS (Important Project of Common European Interest - Next Generation Cloud Infrastructures and Services) in collaboration with SAP, and is an important addendum to the ApeiroRA open source projects, which aim to build a high-performance cloud-edge infrastructure based on European values. The ApeiroRA open source projects are independently governed by the NeoNephos Foundation.
Getting Involved
OpenBao represents the future of open source secrets management—secure, scalable, and community-driven. Whether you're a security professional, a developer, or an organization looking to improve your secrets management posture, OpenBao offers a robust, transparent alternative to proprietary solutions.
Ready to explore OpenBao?
- Visit the OpenBao GitHub repository
- Join the conversation on OpenSSF Slack
- Connect with the community on Matrix
As OpenBao continues its journey within the OpenSSF, organizations worldwide can benefit from a secrets management solution that prioritizes security, transparency, and community collaboration. The future of secrets management is open source, and OpenBao is leading the way.