Top 8 Secrets Management Tools

What is Secret Management?

Secrets management is the practice of controlling, distributing, managing and storing access to sensitive information, such as credentials, passwords, API keys, and encryption keys. Its primary focus is safeguarding this information from unauthorised access and potential security threats. Secret management tools also facilitate versioning of secrets, enabling users to revert to previous versions when necessary, which can be vital for recovery in the event of a security incident.

In modern, cloud-based, and microservices architectures, where applications require access to various credentials to communicate with multiple components, secret management plays a crucial role.While Secrets management is a term applicable across all enterprises, the terms “Secrets” and “Secrets management” are referred to more commonly in IT with regard to DevOps environments, tools, and processes.

While Application and IT environments vary significantly for each organization, one thing that remains constant: every application, script, automation tool and other non-human identity relies on some form of privileged credential to access other tools, applications and data. And the security and protection of these credentials and data is an absolute must. This is where the Secrets Management tools come to our rescue.

Secrets can take multiple forms including:

• Passwords
• API Keys
• Tokens
• SSH keys
• Private certificates
• Encryption keys

In this post we are going to learn about the popular tools used for Secrets management.

• HashiCorp Vault Tool

An open-source and powerful tool that is designed for data encryption, secrete management & identity-based access control. One of the best tools for developer that is best suited for regulating and securing sensitive information in the environment of modern IT and it usually consists of containerized and cloud-based systems. HashiCorp Vault permit you to handle and store the secrete that consists of some passwords, database credentials and other important information. Vault can also produce an effective secrete that can be utilized for several backend as like cloud providers, database etc. It also permits you to allow the limitation for time and go through access to secrets.

You can use this tool to manage certificates, encryption keys, SSH Keys etc for securing infrastructure components and for the security it permit tools and flexibility to save from credential data and you can also access it securely.

• KeyWhiz

An open source tool for distribution system and secret management that is created to provide access control for the thoughtful information such as password, encryption keys, API token etc. A large scale organization and for cloud-native environment,  KeyWhiz is perfectly suited where handling secrete is a important part of compliance and managing security. It permits the administrator to keep an eye on who gain access to what the secrete is and it also maintain audit trails and detailed log and this is important for all the compliance requirement and security. It is basically design to remove the duplicate files to distribute the band and scope. It provide a easily operated web interfaces by users that can easily build by the administrators to handle and access secrete and an authorized user as per there need can retrieve the secrete. This open source secrete management tool is created by Square for automated formation and allocation of secrete for the infrastructure. Square is an mobile payment company and a financial services company that require a secure solution for secrete management. It is also a user-friendly web interface that facilitates the process of storing, creating and recover the secretes. Keywhiz permit you to define access controls and permissions level for several application and users.

• Azure Key Vault

One of the secure and strong cloud-based secret management tool that is given by Microsoft Azure. Azure Key Vault is an important tool for managing and securing secrete that help the organization to maintain the availability, confidentiality their services and data. It is also cost effective that you can use it for free but having some limitation that the reason it is best for small-scale application. A important tool that work is to manage secrete and secure and keys in cloud application. It is created for high availability with extra backup, assure your secrete are always usable. It also provide a secure storage for secretes, certificates & storing keys and this can consist passwords, API Keys, and digital certificates. To provide the high level security, these secure key are stored in HSM that means hardware security module.

• Google Cloud Secrets Manager

A important tool of secrete management in the ecosystem of Google Platform, that is created to manage, access sensitive information, consists of some credentials, passwords, encrypted keys, API keys. It always permit you to make and handle multiple versions of secretes insure that whatever the changes happened, if required can be tracked and reverted. Secrete manager has automatic rotation as well that means it can automate the rotation of secrets, assure you that the credential are updated to increase the security. Google cloud secrete manager can merge with Google cloud services, and by this it become simple to approach secretes from running applications on Google Cloud Provider. With the help of this tool, a new secret can be make by utilizing Google Cloud console, Secret Manager API or the gcloud command-line tool. A user friendly solution for secrete manager in the environment of Google cloud. It is also a pricing model that is based on several versions that is secure for your secrete.

• Keepass

An open-source secrete management and password manager tool that is only created to support the users securely store, recover hypersensitive data as like secure notes, credit cards numbers, password and much more. One of the popular and important feature of Keepass is robust because of its flexibility, many organization as well as individuals are utilizing it and other are using it just for their self-hosted solution and reliability  for secrete management. It is called an open source tool that means its source code is present and reviewed for security. Keepass is also an cross platform and the present versions are Window, Linux, macOs and some mobile platform such as iOs and Android. As like the robust feature of Keepass,  it has many other features like auto-type that permits the users to automatically fulfill the form and some other useful URL, with the help of these URL, websites are automatically open  with some proper credentials.

• 1Password

1Password is not a open-source tool but this tool is one of the best regarded tool for secrete management. It is created for manage, securely store and can share sensitive information such as password, secure notes, some software licenses and many more. This is the easy tool that only focus is on security. Anyone( individuals, organization, any industry, businesses etc) who wants to invest on invest on their digital assets can think of utilizing this tool. 1Password tool is available in many places such as Android, iOS, Web browser, macOs etc.

• CyberArk Conjur

An open-source tool that is created for managing and securing secrete , cloud-native, keys, containerized environment and some other important sensitive credentials. CyberArk Conjur focuses only on increasing the security of secrete utilized by services, applications and this whole process is also known as integration with DevOps and automation pipelines. It support some techniques of authentications that consist of SSO (Single sign-on), LDAP, Active Directory etc.

• GitSecrets

An open source tool that concentrate on providing the unusual risk of secrete and sensitizing information in Git repositories.  It permit you to understand the custom patterns for secrets and this will help you to modify the tool to your important use case and if you want to identify some other pattern you can do that. GitSecretes is  very productive at capture  the pattern you know of secrete, it may not determine the data leakage.

Conclusion

Secrets management plays an pivotal role in protecting sensitive information, like encryptions keys, API keys & other sensitive data. The article explores some of the popular Key Secret management tools such as HashiCorp Vault, GitSecrets, AWS Secrets Manager.

Each single tool has its own features and capabilities. There are many tool but we have explain only few and all of them main focus is to decreases the risk related with secret mishandling.  Secret management tools also facilitate versioning of secrets, enabling users to revert to previous versions when necessary, which can be vital for recovery in the event of a security incident.

Companies use these tools to manage their secrets across their IT ecosystem centrally. These tools reduce the risks associated with poor and manual secrets management, such as hardcoding secrets into scripts, using default passwords, sharing passwords, and not rotating credentials. Secrets management tools replace the old fragmented and manual secrets management and provide central visibility, oversight, and management of a company’s credentials, keys, and other secrets across departments.