Best Practices for Effective Secrets Management

Hello all!

Welcome back to another week of DevOps Insights!

I’m excited to share my knowledge of secrets management with you. Secrets management holds incredible importance, and if handled incorrectly, it can become a major headache.

Let’s jump right in!

What is Secrets Management?

Most, if not all, applications rely on environment variables, API keys, and other secrets for proper functionality. However, storing these secrets in Git is unsafe. Ideally, these secrets should reside in encrypted storage and be retrievable securely.

Many companies must store sensitive credentials in encrypted secrets managers due to the data's sensitivity. Compliance and usage metrics may also necessitate tracking some credentials. Without a proper secrets manager, this can become a complex problem to solve.

Best Practices for Secrets Management

There are several best practices to keep in mind when working with secrets managers, especially for your software environments.

- Encrypt Secrets: Ensure that every stored secret is encrypted both at rest and in transit. Avoid the mistake of encrypting secrets at rest but not fetching them via TLS/SSL, which would expose the information to anyone monitoring the traffic.

- Access Control: Implement access control systems to control access to secrets. Not everyone in your organization should have access to all secrets. Protect production secrets by limiting access to a select few individuals or servers. Consider dividing access control by teams.

- Avoid Hardcoding: It's essential to avoid hardcoding secrets in your code. This should be a well-known practice across your organization to prevent vulnerabilities.

- Rotation Policies: Implement rotation policies for secrets, especially those required for compliance and governance. In general, secrets should be rotated every 90-180 days.

- Audit and Logging: Record every request for secret information, aiding in identifying unauthorized access and meeting compliance requirements.

- Version Secrets: Versioning allows you to roll back when necessary and track changes over time, which is crucial for compliance.

- Usage Monitoring: Monitor how often each secret is used and by whom or which machine. Many secrets managers offer built-in usage monitoring to detect anomalies.

Secrets Managers on the Market

Numerous tools are available for secrets management. It's advisable to define your requirements before choosing one to avoid being overwhelmed. Be cautious when considering cloud-specific vendors, as they might lock you into their ecosystem. Ensure that the selected features are essential for your needs.

Personally, I recommend HashiCorp Vault. I've set it up on-premises and used their cloud offering. The migration process was relatively straightforward. Vault's "secrets engines" handle secrets from various sources, with my favorite being the AWS secrets engine, ideal for short-lived, temporary access, such as in your pipelines.

For managing environment variables in your applications, I recommend dotenv. It simplifies managing environment variables in a single place. The CLI allows you to run a dotenv-vault pull command with the specified environment, creating your .env file.

Additionally, check if your preferred pipeline runner has integrations with the secrets manager. Jenkins, GitHub Actions, and others have plugins for various secrets managers, an important factor in your decision.

Conclusion

Effective secrets management is crucial for any software development team. It ensures data security and keeps production systems out of hackers' reach. On the pipeline side, proper secrets management secures pipelines by utilizing temporary credentials, can help prevent leaking secrets into the environment, and more.