ssh-agent-pkcs11 VS sops

It hasn't been able to do it in a meaningful way.

I've been patching support for this into ssh-agent for about a decade. I wrote a PKCS#11 module which talks to the SSH agent socket to forward your smartcard [0]. Doing so requires three changes to the protocol:

1. The ability to sign arbitrary data and get back the signed result [1]; normally you get back a hashed result [2].

2. The ability to decrypt data, this is what you said. This is less important since many things only require signatures (and not all algorithms support encryption/decryption).

3. The ability to request your certificates [3] [4] this one is kinda obvious.

The benefits of this are that you can use your smartcard on the remote host to do fully authenticated password-less sudo with pam_pkcs11. You can also do anything else that requires you to use your private key to be used, which can include fetching files (TLS client certificate authentication).

Within the US Government, passwords have been being phased out since 2004, but the requirements for authenticated privilege elevation remain.

Another way to accomplish this is to use SSH forwarding of your PC/SC socket but that's less portable and more fragile (and even less secure).

[0] https://github.com/rkeene/ssh-agent-pkcs11

[1] https://cackey.rkeene.org/fossil/artifact/0d0e90bbfdee672c?l...

[2] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-miller-ssh-agent...

[3] https://cackey.rkeene.org/fossil/artifact/0d0e90bbfdee672c?l...

[4] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6187#section-2.1

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.