istio-config-validator VS bank-vaults

there's https://github.com/banzaicloud/bank-vaults wich is a wrapper for hashivault, so not exactly what you're looking for but worth looking into.

https://github.com/banzaicloud/bank-vaults. Mind you after Cisco bought Banzai work on this project seems to have stopped. It works very well for us though.

We are using Banzai Bank Vaults Webhook and we’re very happy with it.

If you ever want to see vault at that kind of level check out bank-vaults. Overkill for many, but it sounds like a decent fit for what you've already got in place and might reduce the boilerplate.

Use vault-env (we use https://github.com/banzaicloud/bank-vaults) to inject the secret as an ENV var to the pod at runtime, based on Vault's Kubernetes auth

We use bank vault to inject secrets as environment variables. This does not require changes to the app. A sidecar is automatically added to the pod to retrieve the secrets and inject them in the app runtime. Here’s the link https://github.com/banzaicloud/bank-vaults

I can follow up with examples if you'd like. You might like BanzaiCloud's Bank Vaults. We personally only use the Configurer component which just provides useful mechanisms to dynamically, or once off, configure Vault via data structures we supplied via ConfigMap.

Encrypted secrets can't be more than a temporary solution. That's why I'm not a fan of SOPS/Sealed Secrets/etc. I think the future for both security and usability is dynamic injection. Vault is the dopeness but I'm not a fan of the upstream Vault Injector -- shared volumes are a step backwards. It's all about the BanzaiCloud Vault Webhook -- secrets **only ever available to the running process**, rotation means: update the value in vault and bounce the pod, done. This is the way.