sops VS git-secret

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.

I've happily been using git-secret (https://sobolevn.me/git-secret/) for encrypting non-critical (i.e. non-production) secrets for a while now. It sounds like Gittuf will do a lot more than git-secret, but for the use case of encrypted files specifically, is there a significant different about with the approach that Gittuf has taken?

Secrets inside the repo. All the credentials, ssh keys, VPN configs can be stored directly in the repo with support of the git secret. gpg key is optional: config works fine if it is not provided and secrets are not decrypted.

You might notice that some of the environmental variables have funky values that look more like template placeholders. For example "SESSION_STORAGE_SECRET=${SESSION_STORAGE_SECRET}". That's because there's a .env file that contains those (you can see it in the root of the GitHub repository page. As a good practice I try to isolate anything that needs to be secret right off the top. So even though this is a development setup and would need work to turn it into a something suitable for production let's try to start off right not doing the wrong thing by hardcoding all our secrets into various files. At least now there's just one file to secure. And later on if you move to something really secure like Hashicorp's Vault product, or even something open source like git secret you won't have to hunt all over the place for the secrets to keep. Lets now look at the rest of the Catalyst application setup:

Checkout git-secret. https://git-secret.io/

There‘s plugins like https://github.com/AGWA/git-crypt or https://git-secret.io that you can use to encrypt the files for yourself, so that they are available on multiple machines to you

If you really want to have private repositories in GitHub, you will need to set up something like https://git-secret.io on top of git.

If you want a low config solution and not scared of gpg, https://git-secret.io/

Hey guys, so I'm using git-secret as of now. Just stumbled across Mozilla SOPS today and finding it interesting. Which one you guys recommend and why? Advantages and disadvantages of each? I think SOPS is more robust and stable since it is being maintained by a large organization? Please correct me if I'm wrong. Help is appreciated.