aws-vault VS sops

Undying fondness for aws-vault to securely cache my session credentials.

you might want to check https://github.com/99designs/keyring and https://github.com/99designs/aws-vault

You install aws-vault (https://github.com/99designs/aws-vault), configure it according to the README and make sure you have an SSO entry that is compatible, i.e.:

I use a aws-vault to switch thought all profiles on all aws account. It support SSO with 2FA.

Nice! Do I understand this correctly?

You use aws-vault(https://github.com/99designs/aws-vault) and configure it with IAM and MFA with YubiKeys. You configure e.g. the profile jonsmith.

When you run

aws-vault exec jonsmith -- aws s3 ls

it will ask you, e.g. every hour to confirm with YubiKeys and cache the key for one hour. After that the temporary keys expire. Can you also store keys different from AWS?

Don't know about kube, but awscli and a few others decouple the idea of getting credentials and doing the actions. You can use the password every time, but a better way is to either use the preconfigured profile or some wrapper which does use the keychain. For example https://github.com/99designs/aws-vault/ supports one-off commands and shell sessions with pre-populated tokens.

It sounds like you have AWS SSO enabled and need a way to run scripts manually in the terminal. Take a look at the aws-vault project that makes it easy working with multiple AWS accounts.

A tool called aws-vault can fix the "insecure" part.

Take a look at aws-vault, which has support for SSO and running in a docker container.

I read the docs on: https://github.com/99designs/aws-vault

My script just sets up default .sops.yaml for https://github.com/getsops/sops

You can further edit .sops.yaml(eg have multiple of them) and decide how you split secrets in your directory tree to further customize who can decrypt the secrets.

It works pretty well for prod/dev splits, etc

Mozilla SOPS (Secrets OPerationS) is an open-source command-line tool for managing and storing secrets. It uses secure encryption methods to encrypt secrets at rest and decrypt them at runtime. SOPS supports a variety of key management systems, including AWS KMS, GCP KMS, Azure Key Vault, and PGP. It's particularly useful in a DevOps context where sensitive data like API keys, passwords, or certificates need to be securely managed and seamlessly integrated into application workflows.

Encrypted secrets thanks to SOPS and Age

We do the exact same thing to keep track of some credentials we use sops[1] and AWS KMS to separate credentials by sensitivity, then use the git differ to view the diffs between the encrypted secrets

Definitely not best practice security-wise, but it works well

[1] https://github.com/getsops/sops

For anyone new to SOPS like I was - https://github.com/getsops/sops

I've found this is largely solved by strictly separating plain config and secrets, and then having secrets pull from GCP secret manager / vault / whatever.

You can then commit all the config (including the secret identifiers) and it all just works so long as you're authenticated with your secret storage system.

We do this for the live configuration as well in line with Gitops and find it to work well.

If you don't want to use a cloud secret manager you can also use something like https://github.com/getsops/sops to commit the encrypted secrets safely

Basically, the simpler the better --just encrypt your secrets and check them in to version control.

We use SOPS[0] for this, and have found it to be pretty nice.

[0]: https://github.com/getsops/sops

The answer is that secrets shouldn't be stored in the git repo at all, but somewhere safe like a password manager or Mozilla's SOPS which people seem to love.

Unfortunately, the SOPS project is in some sort of a limbo state and there has been quite a long period with limited maintenance and unclear position from Mozilla. Despite the project being accepted into the CNCF, it's still unclear what will happen with it going forward.