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What is Secrets Management?#

Secrets management refers to the tools and methods used to manage digital authentication credentials (secrets), such as passwords, keys, APIs, and tokens. These secrets are used in applications, services, privileged accounts, and other sensitive parts of the IT ecosystem. Following secrets management practices strengthens security across your team's development and production environments without impeding on DevOps or Security Ops workflows.

IBM: What is Secrets Management?

Why is Secrets Management Important?#

Secrets management is crucial for several reasons:

  • Prevent Data Breaches: Proper secrets management helps prevent unauthorized access to sensitive data using strict access control policies, reducing the risk of data breaches.
  • Centralization: Storing all secrets in a centralized, secure location reduces secret sprawl across different systems and repositories making it more secure and preventing instances of only a small group within your organization having specialized access that no one else does.
  • Compliance: Many regulatory standards require secure management of secrets to protect sensitive information and for audit purposes.
  • Operational Efficiency: Automating secrets management reduces the risk of human error and ensures that secrets are rotated and revoked as needed while ensuring that secrets are only accessible with the correct permissions.

When Should You Use Secrets Management?#

Secrets management should be used in various scenarios. Some examples include:

  • Application Development: When developing applications that require access to databases, APIs, or other services.
  • DevOps Practices: In CI/CD pipelines to manage secrets securely across different environments.
  • Cloud Services: When using cloud services that require authentication credentials.
  • Automated Processes: For managing secrets used by automated processes and scripts.

Types of Secrets for Secrets Management#

There are various types of secrets that need to be managed, including:

  • Passwords: Used for authentication and access control.
  • API Keys: Used to authenticate requests between applications
  • SSH Keys: Used for secure access to servers and systems.
  • Certificates: Used to establish secure connections and verify identities.
  • Encryption Keys: Used to encrypt and decrypt data.
  • Tokens: Used for session management and authorization.

HCP Vault Dedicated#

Note

It's important to note that HCP Vault should NOT be used as a dedicated user password manager. Vault is designed to support machine workloads and automated workflows. If your team is looking for a solution that manages user passwords, please look at Lastpass, the University's standard for a secure password manager.

With the increasing need for a secrets management solution at the University, HCP Vault Dedicated is the primary secrets management solution for technology workflows. HCP Vault is a SaaS identity-based secrets and encryption management system. It provides encryption services that are gated by authentication and authorization methods to ensure secure, auditable, and restricted access to secrets.

Vault introduces a lot of features such as:

  • Secure Secret Storage: Arbitrary key/value secrets can be stored in Vault. Vault encrypts these secrets prior to writing them to persistent storage, so gaining access to the raw storage isn't enough to access your secrets.
  • Dynamic Secrets: Vault 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 Vault for credentials, and Vault will generate an AWS keypair with valid permissions on demand. After creating these dynamic secrets, Vault will also automatically revoke them after the lease is up.
  • Data Encryption: Vault 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 Vault have a lease associated with them. At the end of the lease, Vault will automatically revoke that secret. Clients are able to renew leases via built-in renew APIs.
  • Revocation: Vault has built-in support for secret revocation. Vault 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.

For more information on Vault, please view the vendor documentation.

Interested in Onboarding?#

Interested in getting your team onboarded? Please view the What to Expect document on the steps to begin the onboarding process. The Secrets Management Team will be happy to work with you!