Reining in Secrets Sprawl: A Guide to Effective Secrets Management

Amid the rapid advancements of the SaaS landscape, lines between speed and security can often blur. In the push for agile deployment and continuous integration, there’s a common risk: secrets sprawl. Sensitive credentials, API keys, and certificates can easily multiply, slipping into code repositories, configuration files, and CI/CD pipelines. Often, this can happen a lot more frequently than one might expect.

Secrets Sprawl: A Hidden Threat in Development Environments

For example, Imagine you’re a junior developer working on a new feature for your company’s application. You’re excited to push your code to GitHub. In the rush to meet the deadline, you accidentally include a sensitive API key in your configuration file. Although you might not realize it, this key could grant access to important company resources. A senior developer might catch this during a code review, or an automated tool might flag it. However, sometimes secrets slip through the cracks. This common scenario is a perfect example of how easy it is for secrets to sprawl across various environments, posing significant security risks.

What is Secrets Sprawl?

Secrets sprawl refers to the uncontrolled proliferation of sensitive data such as passwords, API keys, tokens, and certificates across multiple environments, tools, and repositories within an organization. It isn’t just about static secrets hardcoded into files; it’s about the broader challenge of not being able to properly track and manage secrets across decentralized and dynamic environments. As organizations adopt more complex and decentralized workflows, especially with the growth of DevOps practices, the risk of secrets sprawl increases significantly.

Dangers of Secrets Sprawl

The primary danger of secrets sprawl is the increased risk of security breaches. Here are some key statistics and incidents highlighting the severity of the problem:

• 96% of organizations report secrets sprawled in code, configuration files, and CI/CD tools.¹
• More than 100,000 GitHub repositories have leaked keys. Notable recent incidents include breaches at CircleCI, LastPass, and Uber.²
• 70% of organizations have experienced a secret leak in the past two years.¹
• 83% of organizations have faced an identity-related breach involving compromised credentials.³

When secrets are not properly managed, they can be easily accessed by unauthorized users, leading to data breaches, financial losses, and reputational damage. For example, compromised credentials led to breaches at major companies like Uber and Trello. Stolen service account passwords and unchanged access keys have also been common vectors for attacks.

Ways to Prevent Secrets Sprawl

Addressing secrets sprawl requires a comprehensive strategy that incorporates centralized management, automated detection, and dynamic security practices. By implementing these best practices, organizations can effectively reduce the risk of secrets sprawl and protect sensitive information. Here are some key steps to prevent secrets sprawl:

• Centralized Storage, Management, and Tracking: Implement an automated and centralized system to store, manage, and track all secrets across environments and tools. Centralized management ensures that secrets are stored securely, can be easily tracked, and are not duplicated unnecessarily. This approach provides a single source of truth for managing secrets, reducing the risk of sprawl.
• Dynamic Injection of Environment-Specific Secrets: Mitigate risks by using environment-specific secrets injected dynamically at runtime, rather than hardcoding them in source code or configuration files. This ensures secrets are limited to specific environments, reducing unnecessary replication. While .env files can help, it’s important to source these variables directly from a centralized secrets management platform like Akeyless to maintain full control and security, avoiding exposure in source control or static files.
• Dynamic and Short-Lived Credentials: Implement dynamic secrets that are short-lived and automatically expire after a set period or use. This reduces the risk of secrets being exposed across codebases and environments, as these credentials are temporary and do not persist long enough to be exposed or misused.
• Ease of Use for Developers: Ensure that your secrets management tools are built with developers in mind. Many legacy tools can be difficult to set up and use. If there is too much friction, developers might resort to insecure practices like hardcoding secrets. A user-friendly tool encourages proper security practices and reduces the likelihood of secrets sprawl.

The Problem with Traditional Vaults

To combat secrets sprawl, many organizations have turned to traditional secrets management solutions, commonly referred to as vaults. These systems are designed to centralize the storage and management of secrets, making it easier to control access and monitor their usage. However, traditional vaults come with their own set of challenges:

• High Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): Deploying and maintaining a self-deployed vault often requires significant resources, including dedicated engineers and infrastructure.
• Scalability Issues: Because traditional vaults deploy on-premise infrastructure, they may struggle to scale with the growth of an organization, leading to performance bottlenecks and management challenges.
• User Adoption: Due to their complexity, traditional vaults can be difficult for development teams to adopt, leading to lower usage and potential security gaps.

How Vaultless® Secrets Management Addresses Secrets Sprawl

The modern enterprise landscape, characterized by multi-cloud environments, microservices, and DevOps automation, demands a new approach to secrets management. Managing traditional vaults often becomes more burdensome than managing the secrets themselves.

Vaultless® Secrets Management by Akeyless offers a cloud-native, as-a-service solution that eliminates the need for traditional vaults while lowering the total cost of ownership. Here’s how:

• Manage Secrets, Not Your Vaults: Akeyless is a cloud-native SaaS solution that provides a simple and easy-to-use solution that doesn’t require significant engineering time to maintain. Companies can choose to centralize secrets management without the need for bulky, complex infrastructure. This can prevent those companies from losing, forgetting about, or improperly managing secrets.
• Enhanced Security: Akeyless’s patented Distributed Fragment Cryptography^TM (DFC^TM) technology enables complete control over your secrets. This technology, combined with comprehensive secrets management capabilities including Just-In-Time Credentials, Automated Rotation, and Universal Secrets Connector, ensures a high level of security and functionality. DFC^TM creates distributed fragments of encryption keys that never exist in a complete form. So, even if someone gains access to part of an encryption key, they can’t use it maliciously. This mitigates the risk of secrets sprawl and preventing unauthorized access. 
• Broader Functionality: Akeyless extends beyond secrets management to offer secure employee access, password management, data security, certificate management, and integration with external secrets managers. Akeyless has focused this all-in-one platform for ease of use and scalability, providing unmatched functionality in the secrets management space. With built-in integrations for DevOps tools, Akeyless streamlines workflows and increases adoption across the organization, reducing complexity and consolidating security operations.

By centralizing secrets management without the need for complex infrastructure, Akeyless simplifies the process, reduces costs, and enhances security. This comprehensive approach ensures that secrets are not scattered across various systems and repositories, effectively addressing the core issues of secrets sprawl.

Learn More About Vaultless® Secrets Management

Learn more about vaultless secrets management by exploring the Akeyless Platform. It can enhance your security posture while simplifying secrets management. Discover the benefits of a SaaS-based, zero-knowledge solution that scales with your organization. Visit Akeyless for a demo or to start a free trial today.

See how easy it is to migrate your first secrets to Akeyless👇

References

1. The 2024 State of Secrets Management Survey Report

2. How Bad Can It Git? Characterizing Secret Leakage in Public GitHub Repositories

3. The State of the Identity Attack Surface