git-crypt VS sealed-secrets

https://github.com/AGWA/git-crypt

And occasionally to encrypt files, or receive encrypted files.

These are practical things which are non-theoretical.

> Using multiple keys don't offer added security or secrecy.

Depends on how careful you are or want to be, with your private key. My house key isn't the same as my car key isn't the same as my bike key.

> This is nothing like data harvesting

Alright fair, bad example. What I was grumbling about was more the lack of any clear communication that you've been auto-opted-in to a feature on protonmail, with no user interface signal indicating so, leading to confusion for a couple months like in TFA. I definitely wasn't casting shade on the opengpg keyserver, nor protonmail. It's the "hey! I didn't check a box for this, and it's not mentioned anywhere in the protonmail docs" hidden functionality which could do with some clarification.

I'm a forgetful creature. If I intentionally put my key on a keyserver, because I'm playing around and learning about PGP, will I make the connection between it and protonmail a few months down the line if I move my email account to them? Unlikely.

It's a nice automated feature. Protonmail-to-protonmail e2e encryption makes a lot of sense. I just think protonmail-to-non-protonmail e2e needs a tooltip in the UI, and the option to opt out, potentially with the ability to opt out for specific email addresses. I wouldn't at all assume it would be on by default even IF I've been actively using PGP in my email clients, because it's something you usually have to manually set up yourself, very explicitly. That, and 99.9% of emails are plaintext.

Anyhoo, one thing I forgot which kind of negates the "what if I have multiple encryption keys tied to my email" is the fact that the opengpg keyserver does tie 1 email address to 1 key so you can't publish multiple encryption keys, fair enough. Git-crypt and file encryption, I set my associated email address to use +tags eg [email protected], so as far as protonmail etc are concerned there's only one key per logical email address.

Apart from a few exceptions (like ansible for example, which supports native encryption), we moved away from encrypted secrets in git repos and use external things, depending on the platform (like parameter store / secrets manager for AWS or keyvault for Azure - both of these do track changes, btw), so I haven't looked for quite a while. Back in ye olden days we used https://github.com/AGWA/git-crypt which worked quite nicely, but the key management is cumbersome and it's based on GPG, which in itself is a bit of a light redish flag these days.

How about encryption?

https://github.com/AGWA/git-crypt has been solid for me

You might want to check out git-crypt. It allows you to encrypt and decrypt files in a git repo without needing an external account, and supports .env files. That said, trying your hand at making one as a personal project could be a fun and rewarding experience!

I hesitate to append this but one option I have seen thrown around and also debated is git-crypt [1] There are many caveats to doing this as any integrations that would need to read the file contents would also need to be able to decrypt the files so this may not be entirely useful and may add many levels of complexity and fragility.

[1] - https://github.com/AGWA/git-crypt

The most interesting approach I've seen for this is https://github.com/AGWA/git-crypt

Here is the Makefile.

I use git-crypt to encrypt files in git repositories quite a lot and I find that it doesn't work on RHEL-based distros because of some missing or out-of-date library. I need to build a statically linked binary.

Store the Secrets in a repo using gitcrypt or another encryption tool.

Consider using git-crypt for transparent encryption instead.

If you have noticed, you are setting secrets in plain text on the application-configmap.yml file, which is not ideal and is not a best practice for security. The best way to do this securely would be to use AWS Secrets Manager, an external service like HashiCorp Vault, or Sealed Secrets. To learn more about these methods see the blog post Shhhh... Kubernetes Secrets Are Not Really Secret!.

Yeah documentation is hard and I'm guilty (as a former maintainer of SealedSecrets)

SealedSecrets was designed with "write only" secrets in mind.

Turns out a lot of people need to access the current secrets because they need to update a part of a "composite" secret.

There are two kinds of "composite" secrets, one easy and one harder, but if you don't know how to do it, even the easier is hard:

1. Secret with multiple data "items" (also called keys in K8s Secret jargon but that's confusing when there is encryption involved). I.e. good old "data":{"foo": "....", "bar": "..."}

2. Secrets where data within one item is actually a config file with cleartext and secrets mixed up in one single string (usually some JSON or YAML or TOML)

Case 1 is "easy" to deal with once you realize that sealed secrets files are just text files and you can just manually merge and update encryoted data items. We even created a "merge" and some "raw" encryption APIs to make that process a little less "copy pasta" but it's still hard to have a good UX that works for everyone.

Case 2 is harder. We did implement a data templating feature that allows you to generate a config file via a go-template that keeps the cleartext parts in clear and uses templating directives to inject the secret parts where you want (referencing the encrypted the items)

The main problem with case 2 is that it's undocumented.

The feature landed in 2021:

https://github.com/bitnami-labs/sealed-secrets/pull/580

I noticed that people at my current $dayjob used sealed secrets for years and it took me a while to understand that the reason they hated it was that they didn't know about that fundamental feature.

And how to blame them!? It's still undocumented!

In my defense I spent so much effort before and after I left VMware to lobby so that the project got the necessary staffing so it wouldn't die of bitrot that I didn't have much time left to work on documentation. Which is a bit said and probably just an excuse :-)

That said, I'm happy that the project is alive and the current maintainers are taking care of it against the forces of entropy. Perhaps some doc work would be useful too. Unfortunately I don't have time for now.

This might be OT, and forgive me, but I think one of the best practices for Encrypting and Managing secrets in Kubernetes is to use Sealed Secrets, they allow your secrets to be securely stored in git with the rest of the configuration and yet no one with access to the Git repository will be able to read them. I say this might be OT, because Sealed Secrets are trying to mitigate a different threat, the threat of the secrets at rest somewhere, and not "live in the cluster", where in theory all the ingredients to decrypt the secrets would still live.

The addition of Consul and Vault gives me a few things. For one, right now I'm handling secrets with a mixture of SOPS and Sealed Secrets. I use Vault in my professional life, and have used both Vault and Consul at my last job. Vault is a beast, so I may as well get better at it; plus its options for secret injection are better.

Use Sealed Secrets Operator.

sealed-secrets (sealed)

An option that easily works with GitOps is the Operator Sealed Secrets from Bitnami. Secrets encrypted with it can only be decrypted by operators running inside the cluster, not even by the original author. For encryption, there is a CLI (and a third-party web UI) that requires a connection to the cluster. The disadvantage of this is that the key material is stored in the cluster, the secrets are bound to the cluster and one has to take care of backups and operation.