![]() ![]() In some cases, these holistic secrets management solutions are also integrated within privileged access management (PAM) platforms, which can layer on privileged security controls. ![]() These solutions can reduce risks by identifying, securely storing, and centrally managing every credential that grants an elevated level of access to IT systems, scripts, files, code, applications, etc. Some secrets management or enterprise privileged credential management/privileged password management solutions go beyond just managing privileged user accounts, to manage all kinds of secrets-applications, SSH keys, services scripts, etc. While application password management is an improvement over manual management processes and standalone tools with limited use cases, IT security will benefit from a more holistic approach to manage passwords, keys, and other secrets throughout the enterprise. Then, there are application password management tools that can broadly manage application passwords, eliminate hardcoded and default passwords, and manage secrets for scripts. While there are many tools that manage some secrets, most tools are designed specifically for one platform (i.e. Siloes and manual processes are frequently in conflict with “good” security practices, so the more comprehensive and automated a solution the better. Generally, more manual secrets management processes equate to a higher likelihood of security gaps and malpractices.īest Practices & Solutions for Secrets ManagementĪs noted above, manual secrets management suffers from many shortcomings. Poor secrets hygiene, such as lack of password rotation, default passwords, embedded secrets, password sharing, and using easy-to-remember passwords, mean secrets are not likely to remain secret, opening up the opportunity for breaches. Leaving password security in the hands of humans is a recipe for mismanagement. How do you ensure that the authorization provided via remote access or to a third-party is appropriately used? How do you ensure that the third-party organization is adequately managing secrets? Manual secrets management processes Third-party vendor accounts/remote access solutions Again, these secrets should all be managed according to best security practices, including credential rotation, time/activity-limited access, auditing, and more. DevOps teams typically leverage dozens of orchestration, configuration management, and other tools and technologies (Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Salt, Docker containers, etc.) relying on automation and other scripts that require secrets to work. While secrets need to be managed across the entire IT ecosystem, DevOps environments are where the challenges of managing secrets seem to be particularly amplified at the moment. Each of these VM instances comes with its own set of privileges and secrets that need to be managed DevOps tools Privileged credentials and the cloudĬloud and virtualization administrator consoles (as with AWS, Office 365, etc.) provide broad superuser privileges that enable users to rapidly spin up and spin down virtual machines and applications at massive scale. DevOps tools frequently have secrets hardcoded in scripts or files, which jeopardizes security for the entire automation process. Often, applications and IoT devices are shipped and deployed with hardcoded, default credentials, which are easy to crack by hackers using scanning tools and applying simple guessing or dictionary-style attacks. Privileged passwords and other secrets are needed to facilitate authentication for app-to-app (A2A) and application-to-database (A2D) communications and access. Without oversight that stretches across all IT layers, there are sure to be security gaps, as well as auditing challenges. This becomes a particular shortcoming of decentralized approaches where admins, developers, and other team members all manage their secrets separately, if they’re managed at all. SSH keys alone may number in the millions at some organizations, which should provide an inkling of a scale of the secrets management challenge. All privileged accounts, applications, tools, containers, or microservices deployed across the environment, and the associated passwords, keys, and other secrets. ![]()
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