nuts-foundation / nuts-foundation/nuts-node

Crypto: favor direct support for key vaults over external secret storage

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Dominant language
Go
Stars
28
Forks
23
Avg merge
1d 10h
Merged PRs (30d)
76

Description

About a year ago, the concept of "external secret storage" was introduced to let parties use key storage other than HashiCorp Vault by implementing an API. As far as I know, this was to cater Azure Key Vault users since. At the time, we thought you needed the quite bloated Azure SDK completely, and we didn't want/couldn't implement/test the feature (since no core maintainer was actually using Azure).

Things now changed:

  • People are that use Azure Key Vault want to contribute this feature (me)
  • Using the Azure SDK for a specific service (Key Vault) only requires you to depend on azcore and azkeys, which aren't that big dependencies at all
  • The external secret store API in still marked "experimental" since it's missing feature (e.g. security), which nobody seems willing to contribute. So it's another unmaintained feature.

Suggestion:

  • Drop support for secret store API (or at least deprecate it) in favor of directly supporting stores (HashiCorp Vault and Azure Key Vault).
  • Find out impact of people having to migrate from using HashiCorp Vault through Secret Store API to directly using it from the Nuts node (just configuration, or does it require migration?)

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

No files, tests, or entry points are named. First map the existing external secret storage API and current HashiCorp Vault integration, then assess the migration impact for existing configurations. Done means a decided deprecation or removal path and a defined scope for direct Azure Key Vault support.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
azure, go
Domain
cloud, security
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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