Secure Password Sharing at France’s Ministry of the Interior

The French Ministry of the Interior is responsible for internal security, territorial administration, and the protection of public freedoms. To support these missions, a dedicated digital team within the Ministry provides shared (“cross-functional”) services used by the Ministry’s IT departments. This approach allows individual development teams to focus on their own applications while relying on centrally maintained, common tools.

The Ministry was already using password managers, which helped prevent uncontrolled circulation of credentials. However, sharing passwords securely and efficiently across teams remained a challenge.

For shared service accounts in particular, existing methods lacked centralized audit trails and introduced operational friction.

The team identified the need for a platform that could:

• Share passwords with a single user or a defined team
• Be fully self-hosted within the Ministry’s own data centers
• Remain open source, with no license requirement for the base versio
• Rely on recognized cryptographic standards such as OpenPGP
• Operate across Windows, Linux, and Android
• Be easy to use for both technical and non-technical staff

A market review showed that Passbolt met the Ministry’s requirements. The Community Edition offered unlimited users, a browser extension for form auto-fill, and per-password OpenPGP encryption. Interest in the tool quickly spread beyond the original engineering team.

After a successful two-week proof of concept (POC), the team upgraded to the paid version of the software, Passbolt Pro, to support a larger user base. This version added single sign-on (SSO), administrator-assisted account recovery, and comprehensive activity logs.

The deployment was further strengthened by integrating the Passbolt Ansible plugin into the Ministry’s automation and infrastructure-as-code (IaC) pipelines.

Throughout the rollout, Passbolt’s support team remained available and responsive, helping resolve issues quickly.

By June 2025, more than 600 Ministry staff were using Passbolt to manage over 25,000 passwords, with more than 160,000 password-sharing events recorded. The adoption of a centralised platform also reduced routine support requests related to password access.