Vault VS sops

HashiCorp Vault

For a more comprehensive and robust secret management solution, get your hands on tools like GCP Secret Manager, or HashiCorp Vault. They're like the security guards of your secrets, providing a safe house, access control, and keeping logs of who’s been snooping around.

HashiCorp Vault is a popular tool for managing secrets in Kubernetes clusters. It offers advanced features such as secure storage, encryption, dynamic secrets generation, and integration with Kubernetes through its Kubernetes authentication method.

So you've just bought a new platform tool? Maybe it's Hashicorp Vault? Snyk? Backstage? You’re excited about all of the developer experience, security and other benefits you're about to unleash on your company—right? But wait…

You seem to be looking for a cross-platform solution, and https://www.vaultproject.io/ provides just that. If everything was in AWS, AWS Secret Manager might be great, but imo Vault provides much better platform-agnostic capabilities.

https://github.com/openwrt/luci/blob/master/applications/luc...

https://developer.hashicorp.com/vault/tutorials/secrets-mana... https://github.com/hashicorp/vault :

> Refer to Build Certificate Authority (CA) in Vault with an offline Root for an example of using a root CA external to Vault.

Secret Management: Securely stores sensitive configuration data and secrets using tools like AWS Secrets Manager or HashiCorp Vault. Avoid hardcoding secrets in code or configuration files.

The author of this tool basically took the Shamir code from Hashicorp Vault, which is pretty mainstream. If you're looking for a solid implementation, I would start there[0]. I wouldn't use the Shamir code from this repo, as it's an old version of the vault code using field arithmetic that doesn't run in constant time.

[0]: https://github.com/hashicorp/vault/blob/main/shamir/shamir.g...

Out of curiosity, what do you mean by this? cross-cluster? they already have HA: https://github.com/hashicorp/vault/blob/v1.14.1/website/cont...

while digging up that link, I also saw one named replication: https://github.com/hashicorp/vault/blob/v1.14.1/website/cont...

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.