In the context of DevSecOps and engineering practices, the term secrets typically refers to digital credentials, such as usernames, passwords, passphrases, auth tokens, SSH keys, SSL/TLS certificates, and application and API keys.
The life cycle of secrets in an enterprise begins with their creation, where secrets such as passwords, API keys, and certificates are generated or created by a user. These secrets are then securely stored in a protected environment, such as a secrets management system or an encrypted vault. Throughout the life cycle, access and usage of the secrets are audited to detect and respond to any suspicious activities. When a secret is no longer required, it is deleted in order to prevent unauthorized recovery and prevent standing privileges.
Secrets management refers to the secure storage, management, and restricted access to business-critical credentials, collectively known as secrets. Secrets are used to authenticate enterprise processes, workflows, services, and applications.
Typically, an enterprise deals with a wide range of secrets, depending on their internal processes and IT orientations. However, the following are the prime examples of the types of secrets involved in a common enterprise IT practice.
As organizations grow and scale, secrets management becomes an uncompromising need for their IT, DevOps, and engineering teams. This is because of the expanding nature of their codebases and processes, which causes a proliferation of secrets across various applications, microservices, developer and RPA tools, containers and orchestration workflows, and APIs.
Credentials are often stored in plaintext formats within files and scripts, and are commonly shared among multiple individuals involved in CI/CD pipelines, automation processes, and engineering workflows. Altering these credentials without proper planning or notification can result in the cascading failure of multiple critical processes.
Additionally, if these credentials are inadvertently exposed, they can be exploited by malicious actors to breach an organization's vital information systems. Hence, it is crucial to implement secure and well-defined procedures for managing and protecting these credentials to mitigate the risk of unauthorized access or misuse.
However, with a proper secrets management solution in place, enterprise teams can avoid embedding credentials in plaintext formats by storing them in an encrypted digital vault, which provides options for securely fetching, rotating, tracking, and managing secrets from a central console.
Here are some common risks and caveats associated with secrets management:
When secrets are not properly managed, they can be easily stolen by attackers. This can lead to data breaches, which can damage an organization's reputation and cost millions of dollars in remediation costs.
Without a proper secrets management routine in place, it is practically impossible to track the usage of these secrets that are used to authenticate processes and workflows. This in turn makes it difficult for security teams to pre-empt and mitigate the risks of credential abuse.
If hard-coded credentials are altered without any prior planning and approval, this could lead to failure of multiple workflows, services, and process in tandem.
Many industries are subject to regulations that require organizations to protect sensitive data. If secrets are not properly managed, an organization may be found to be in violation of these regulations, which can result in fines or other penalties.
With the increasing volume and complexity of enterprise processes and workflows, it is important for IT teams to employ a sound secrets management policies, which includes periodic scanning, rotation, and live monitoring of secrets distributed across the organization.
As cited above, manual management of is often siloed, and hard-coding of secrets is both a cumbersome process and bad security practice. Most tools in the market are designed to manage the secrets of specific applications or platforms (Kubernetes, Docker, Jenkins, etc), or sub-processes under them. While application password management tools have gained traction over the years, most tools only offer a basic vault to fetch and store secrets, and nothing beyond.
With compliance becoming an inevitable mandate across industries, the buck does not stop with just storing the secrets in a vault. It is equally imperative to rotate them periodically, monitor their usage, and audit user activities and processes authenticated by these secrets for effective and pervasive compliance with industry standards.
Secrets management is an integral module of modern privileged access management (PAM) tools, which not only come with secrets vaulting capabilities, but also offer fine-grained access governance controls to enforce control over who has access to these secrets. PAM tools also offer secure application-to-application password management (AAPM) controls to authenticate applications, endpoints, non-human accounts, processes, and services that are distributed across the enterprise.
Secrets management tools are used by organizations to securely vault, govern, and share secrets across users. It is important to use such tools because they reduce the risk of data breach, unsolicited standing privileges, and help in eradicating privilege sprawl. Typically, secrets management tools come built-in with a vault that can help you store secrets in encrypted format, a secure sharing mechanism that lets administrators share secrets to privileged users without revealing the credentials.
PAM360, ManageEngine's enterprise PAM solution, provides out-of-the-box integrations with container platforms, DevSecOps CI/CD solutions, and RPA tools to ensure secure management of application credentials. This integration allows processes and applications to automatically retrieve credentials from PAM360's vault. You'll also be able to perform sensitive actions such as access provisioning, periodic password changes, granular control, and auditing—all without disrupting internal workflows.