OpenBao exists to provide a software solution to manage, store, and distribute
sensitive data including secrets, certificates, and keys. The OpenBao community
intends to provide this software under an OSI-approved open-source license, led
by a community run under open governance principles.

A modern system requires access to a multitude of secrets: database
credentials, API keys for external services, credentials for service-oriented
architecture communication, etc. Understanding who is accessing what secrets is
already very difficult and platform-specific. Adding on key rolling, secure
storage, and detailed audit logs is almost impossible without a custom
solution. This is where OpenBao steps in.

The key features of OpenBao are:

- 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.
OpenBao can write to disk, Consul, and more.
- Dynamic Secrets: OpenBao can generate secrets on-demand for some systems,
such as AWS or SQL databases. For example, when an application needs to
access an S3 bucket, it asks OpenBao for credentials, and OpenBao will generate
an AWS keypair with valid permissions on demand. After creating these dynamic
secrets, OpenBao will also automatically revoke them after the lease is up.
- Data Encryption: OpenBao can encrypt and decrypt data without storing it.
This allows security teams to define encryption parameters and developers to
store encrypted data in a location such as a SQL database without having to
design their own encryption methods.
- Leasing and Renewal: All secrets in OpenBao have a lease associated with
them. At the end of the lease, OpenBao will automatically revoke that secret.
Clients are able to renew leases via built-in renew APIs.
- Revocation: OpenBao has built-in support for secret revocation. OpenBao can
revoke not only single secrets, but a tree of secrets, for example, all
secrets read by a specific user, or all secrets of a particular type.
Revocation assists in key rolling as well as locking down systems in the case
of an intrusion.