KeyRack vs OpenStack Barbican

KeyRack is an open-source key management coordination layer that you deploy in your own infrastructure, rather than use as a hosted cloud KMS. It tracks key hierarchies, drives rotation and delegates cryptographic operations to configured backends. Its KEK-wrapping hierarchies support namespace-scoped rules and cascade operations. Authorization is checked on every operation through an external policy decision point such as Cedar or OPA; KeyRack does not bundle an identity provider, but can integrate with OIDC providers including Keycloak, Auth0, Okta, Azure AD and Google Identity Platform. Backend choices include PKCS#11, HashiCorp Vault Transit, a KMIP client and in-process software for development and testing. Audit events can be delivered through NATS, files or stdout, with BLAKE3 hash-chain linking and optional Ed25519 signing. Non-exportable keys in an HSM or Vault provider remain there; exportable keys may leave through authorized export operations. The open-source core costs nothing under AGPL-3.0-or-later. Commercial licensing is available by contacting KeyRack for pricing and evaluation access.

OpenStack Barbican is the OpenStack Key Manager service for storing, provisioning, and managing secrets such as keys, certificates, passwords, and raw binary data. Its barbican-api component provides an OpenStack-native REST API for managing secrets; barbican-worker and barbican-keystone-listener are also part of the service. The listener manages Barbican’s database records for Keystone projects when those projects are deleted. A plugin architecture lets operators connect software secret stores or hardware such as HSMs. Documented options include KMIP, Dogtag, and Vault secret-store plugins, as well as PKCS#11 crypto plugins. With PKCS#11, master encryption and HMAC keys can reside in an HSM. Operators can develop plugins for storage, generation, and event handling, though support status may be stable, experimental, or out-of-tree. The default Simple Crypto plugin stores its single encryption key in plaintext in barbican.conf, so service-node access must be restricted carefully. Container ACL settings do not carry over to associated secrets, and ACL functionality requires Keystone integration. Barbican is free under Apache 2.0; installation guidance assumes a working OpenStack deployment.