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OpenBao Joins the OpenSSF to Advance Secure Secrets Management in Open Source

· 3 min read

OpenBao Joins the OpenSSF to Advance Secure Secrets Management in Open Source

We’re excited to welcome OpenBao to the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) as a newly accepted sandbox project!

OpenBao is an open source identity-based secrets and encryption management system that helps organizations securely store, manage, and audit access to sensitive data like API keys, passwords, and certificates. Originally developed under LF Edge and forked from HashiCorp Vault, OpenBao has now found its new home in the OpenSSF, where it aligns more directly with the needs of security professionals and open source maintainers.

“Joining OpenSSF has been a dream come true,” said Alex Scheel, Chair of the OpenBao Technical Steering Committee. “This wouldn’t be possible without the support of OpenSSF’s Technical Advisory Council—many thanks for their help and consideration!”

Announcing OpenBao Namespaces

· 6 min read

We are excited to introduce Namespaces to the OpenBao Secret Manager – a powerful feature designed to bring robust multi-tenancy and fine-grained isolation to your secrets management workflows.

What Are Namespaces?

Namespaces in OpenBao are logical partitions within a single OpenBao instance, functioning as isolated environments where teams, organizations, or applications can operate independently.

Each namespace acts like a mini-OpenBao, with its own policies, authentication methods, secret engines, tokens, and identity groups. This architecture enables organizations to implement a true OpenBao-as-a-Service model, empowering internal customers to self-manage their environments securely and efficiently.

OpenBao Adopted as the Secret Store for EdgeX Foundry

· 3 min read

Great news for the OpenBao community! In a major step towards enhancing its own security and openness, EdgeX Foundry has officially adopted OpenBao as its default secret store for the EdgeX 4.0 release.

What is EdgeX Foundry?

For those unfamiliar, EdgeX Foundry is an open-source, IoT/edge computing framework hosted by the Linux Foundation. It’s designed to enable seamless communication between devices, applications and services using a flexible, microservices-based architecture. Whether you’re working in automation, energy, or building management, EdgeX helps bring everything together in a standardized way.

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OpenBao Travels Back Home

· 3 min read

OpenBao returns from FOSDEM '25 and OpenUK's State of Open Con this week, reflecting on the travels and activities of the events.

Many thanks to Fatima for running the community calls in our absence!

Alex-Presenting-FOSDEM

photo credit: nicolas; pictured: alex

FOSDEM '25 was Alex's first time speaking at a conference and we are happy to report it was a success! The details of the talk were saved and will be published in a follow-up blog along with the recording when it is made available from the conference. It was great to meet so many people interested in identity and access management and OpenBao's role in solving secrets management problems, at GitLab and beyond.

OpenBao Travels to FOSDEM

· 3 min read

Follow along with OpenBao's travels this week as we attend FOSDEM '25 and State of Open Con!

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Check out Alex's talk at FOSDEM, on Sunday, February 2nd, at 2:05 PM GMT+1 in room UA2.118 (Henriot) as part of the Identity and Access Management track.

If you can't attend in person, it will also be live streamed.

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From snowy Minnesota, BaoBao took its first ride to London Heathrow to begin its voyage to FOSDEM '25. With a brief layover, it explored King's Cross and the Coal Drops Yard. Rich with history, this area has long been used as a rail hub for the UK and now is connected to Europe via the Channel Tunnel.

Announcing OpenBao v2.1.0!

· 4 min read

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We are thrilled to announce the availability of OpenBao v2.1.0, focused on safety and scalability improvements!

This release spent some time laying the groundwork for safety and scalability improvements for releases to come. With the help of the community, OpenBao will now take advantage of transactional storage semantics from its underlying data store, giving operators and plugin developers confidence in the consistency of storage writes. This storage safety allows us to focus on alternative storage layouts for improving scalability, for instance, increasing the maximum number of mount table entries past the single-entry limit.

This release also features contributions from many new and repeat contributors; thank you all!