Web applications often require secrets like API keys, passwords, and private certificates to function, but storing and accessing these resources can leave developers vulnerable to security risks.

In this article, you will learn about the challenges of secret management as well as some of the best practices for managing, storing, and reading secrets in web applications.

What Are Secrets?

Secrets are digital credentials used for authentication and authorization. They manage access rights at both the human-to-application and application-to-application levels.

Common types of secrets include:

Secrets provide users and applications with access to sensitive data, systems, and services. This is why it is critical to keep secrets secure in transit and at rest.

The most frequent method for storing secrets has been to use .env files, often known as environment variables; however, these files can expose data to unauthorized users, and manually managing the files can lead to errors.

For more details on the risks posed by .env files, read here.

Secret management offers a more secure alternative.

What Is Secret Management?

To understand secret management, you first need to know the secret life cycle.

Secrets Life Cycle

A healthy secret should follow this process:

Secret management is the process of safely and efficiently managing the production, rotation, revocation, and storage of credentials throughout the secret lifecycle. Think of it as an improved version of password management. While the scope of managed credentials is broadening, the purpose remains the same: to protect vital assets from unwanted access.

Why is Secret Management Important?

Secret management reduces or eliminates user participation in the administration of secrets in order to limit potential points of failure.

In general, it contributes to security on three levels:

However, implementing secret management means integrating security measures into the most vulnerable levels of an organization’s infrastructure—clouds, code, data, and devices—which can be difficult.

Challenges to Secret Management

Some of the common risks to secret management include:

However, there are solutions and best practices to address these issues and keep your sensitive data safe.

Best Practices for Secret Management

There are several methods you can use to provide a safe and secure way for your users and apps to retrieve what they need to access systems.

Here is what you need to do to build an efficient secret management system within your organization.

Centralized Access/Control

First, you need to centralize your secrets. Many projects store secrets in version control systems such as GitHub, Bitbucket, and GitLab.

Centralizing your data makes it easier to control who can access secrets and at what times.

To centralize secrets, you can save them in a database or use a Secrets Manager.

Read more about Secret Managers here.

Create a Secret Management Policy

A unified secret management policy should provide stringent guidelines for the structure of secrets (minimum length, complexity, usage of special characters, forbidden passwords, reuse, and duration) while prohibiting the use of default or hard-coded secrets.

Some fundamental features should be included in this policy:

Automate Secret Management Processes

When actions aren’t automated, you run the risk of damage caused by human error. Try to rely on technology rather than humans to develop, manage, disseminate, and maintain secrets and remove any hard-coded or embedded secrets.

Use Granular Permissions That Can Be Revoked

Provide temporary credentials to unique individuals or entities at the granular level, also known as dynamic secrets, so that in case of any breach, the affected credentials can be revoked without affecting the entire development infrastructure.

At the very least, different sets of credentials should be created for different production systems or teams, ideally for each environment.

Encrypt Secrets at All Times

Secrets should be encrypted in transit and at rest so as to ensure maximum security within the network.

Your encryption keys should be consolidated in the secrets management solution, allowing you to establish proper control over who has access to those keys.

Audit Privileged Sessions

To improve oversight and accountability, employ privileged session monitoring to log, audit, and monitor all privileged sessions for accounts, users, scripts, and automation tools.

Capturing keystrokes and screens is also an option, allowing for live view and playback.

Some business privilege session management solutions also allow IT teams to detect suspicious in-progress session behavior and halt, lock, or terminate the session until the activity can be thoroughly investigated.

Keep Data Separate

Take advantage of the distributed nature of today’s networks. Keep secrets and sensitive data separate rather than concentrating them in the same location. This makes it easier to use and update secrets within the development infrastructure.

Conclusion

Secret management is critical for preserving an organization’s cybersecurity. Your organization should develop a core secret management strategy that defines uniform rules and processes for all phases of a secret’s lifecycle in order to manage secrets securely and effectively.