July 15, 2024
Posted by Suresh Sathyamurthy | CMO
The CISO’s Guide to Secrets Management gets to the heart of the secrets management crisis. As a CISO you are facing an unprecedented challenge. Businesses are rapidly migrating to multicloud environments making the task of safeguarding digital assets increasingly complex. The protection of “secrets” – privileged credentials, encryption keys, and certificates are emerging as a critical concern.
It’s like trying to secure a house with a thousand doors, each with its own unique lock. And the number of doors keeps growing.
A single door unlocked can lead to operational chaos, data theft, and severe reputational damage like the recent breaches at Cloudflare, Uber, LastPass and Microsoft.
Complicating matters is the explosion of both human and machine identities in modern IT ecosystems. Traditional security approaches, designed for simpler times, are struggling to keep pace. Cybercriminals, ever-adaptive, are quick to exploit these vulnerabilities.
Adding to this challenge is the burden of legacy technology and outdated practices. Trying to address modern security threats with legacy tools can feel like trying to roll a boulder uphill while fending off thieves. This technological mismatch forces companies to allocate substantial resources to maintain and patch systems that are fundamentally ill-equipped for today’s threat landscape. The result is a costly, inefficient security posture that leaves organizations vulnerable despite their best efforts.
Read on for insights into how enterprises can move forward with confidence and protect their sensitive assets while shedding the weight of outdated systems and practices.
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Credential compromise has emerged as the primary gateway for malicious actors.
Recent high-profile security breaches like the recent CDK Global attack, share a common thread: the exploitation of exposed secrets.
While other vulnerabilities, such as those experienced by Cloudflare due to insecure coding practices and cloud misconfigurations, do provide potential entry points, it’s the abuse of privileged credentials that enables attackers to move laterally within systems, escalating the breach’s severity.
Our modern sprawling networks of applications, infrastructure, and cloud environments create an ever-expanding attack surface. In this complex ecosystem, identity management and intelligent protection of secrets are critical.
And while human-centric security approaches is crucial, a new challenge looms on the horizon: the exponential growth of machine identities and their unique security implications.
When it comes to identity and access management, human users are just the tip of the iceberg.
The real challenge lurking beneath the surface is the exponential growth of non-human identities like service accounts, applications, containers, virtual machines, databases, scheduled tasks, CI/CD pipelines, and more.
The average enterprise already has a staggering 45x more machine identities than human workers. This number is rapidly accelerating as companies adopt modern technologies like cloud, containers, microservices, and automation.
Each of these non-human entities requires its own set of credentials, keys, certificates, and other secrets to authenticate, communicate, and perform its function securely.
We’re talking about millions or even billions of secrets that need to be properly secured, rotated, and managed across the entire environment. Keeping this torrent of machine identity secrets under control is overwhelmingly complex, if not impossible, with manual processes and disconnected tools.
Akeyless offers an intelligent, automated, and centralized way to discover, manage, and secure all secrets – both human and non-human. This approach reduces the risk of unplanned downtime from expired service credentials and prevents orphaned identities with excessive privileges from opening up lateral movement pathways for attackers.
Additionally, it ensures that unsecured secrets hidden in codebases or CI/CD pipelines do not become ticking time bombs.
CISOs are facing a tsunami of secrets.
Passwords, API keys, and encryption keys are flooding your organization’s systems, overwhelming the ability to track and secure them across enterprises.
Secrets sprawl isn’t just a nuisance—it’s crippling businesses. Eight out of ten companies have suffered outages from expired machine identities. Half have come to a standstill due to mismanaged credentials.
You’ve seen the headlines. SolarWinds. Colonial Pipeline. Uber.
All breached due to poor secrets handling including leaked API keys, stolen certificates, and compromised credentials. Last year, stolen credentials caused more data breaches than any other factor, accounting for half of all incidents.
And, the problem is growing. Your enterprise likely has 240% more digital identities than two years ago. Developers added nearly 13 million new secrets to GitHub in 2023 alone.
Security teams are drowning. They can’t keep up with the surge of new microservices and cloud instances, each spawning its own set of credentials. This explosion of secrets leaves enterprises vulnerable to supply chain attacks and data breaches.
Akeyless SaaS Secrets Management is your life raft. Centralized, automated secrets management can help you regain control. It will manage and protect every credential across your IT landscape.
Secrets sprawl does not have to sink your organization. You can take action to stem the tide.
As a CISO, you’re caught in a tug-of-war.
Your DevOps team is laser-focused on preventing credential theft in their daily code work. Meanwhile, you’re juggling broader concerns like cloud misconfigurations and container vulnerabilities. This misalignment is creating dangerous blind spots in your security.
The numbers paint a stark picture. Less than half of security teams use a dedicated secrets management system. Over half are unhappy with their current approach, citing inability to secure all secrets and lack of central management.
This fragmented approach leaves you vulnerable on multiple fronts:
- Attackers can escalate privileges using leaked admin credentials.
- Compromised service accounts allow lateral movement across your systems.
- Exposed encryption keys can lead to data breaches.
- Stolen API keys put your cloud resources at risk of hijacking.
- Expired certificates and unrotated credentials cause unexpected downtime.
You can’t manually track and rotate every credential scattered across your expanding cloud, DevOps, and on-premises environments. It’s simply not scalable.
You need a unified approach that aligns both your day-to-day and long-term security needs. A centralized system that gives you visibility, control, and automation over all your secrets.
Don’t let misalignment and manual processes leave you exposed. It’s time to bridge the gap between your teams and adopt a comprehensive secrets management strategy.
If you feel like you’re drowning in a sea of point solutions for secrets management, you’re not alone.
Most organizations are trying to cobble together 15 different tools from 18 categories, supplied by over 60 vendors. It’s a mess.
This patchwork approach is more than just a headache—it’s dangerous and expensive. A whopping 77% of organizations can’t even figure out which security tools they actually need.
Think about it. You’ve got:
- Cloud providers’ secrets services, each for their own platform
- Standalone solutions that only handle some secrets
- PAM tools for admin credentials
- Separate systems for certificates and SSH keys
- KMS for encryption keys
- IGA for certain identities
This fragmented setup leaves you with gaping security holes. You can’t see or control all your secrets in one place. You’re constantly juggling different tools, increasing the risk of mistakes and oversights.
The industry knows this isn’t sustainable. That’s why major vendors are scrambling to build comprehensive secrets management into their platforms. They recognize that you need a single solution to handle all secrets, for both humans and machines.
Forward-thinking companies like DropBox, Progress, and Thales are already moving to centralized platforms like Akeyless. These solutions offer complete coverage, integrate seamlessly with your existing tech, and give you a unified policy framework.
Don’t let secrets sprawl be your Achilles’ heel. It’s time to consolidate and take control. Your organization’s security depends on it.
You need a comprehensive strategy to solve your secrets management challenges.
Engage the right people, processes, and accountability structures across your organization.
Here’s how to take the lead:
- Form a Secrets Management Task Force. Include representatives from IAM, security operations, app development, DevOps, cloud engineering, and business units. This team will create policies and processes that work for everyone.
- Appoint a Deputy CISO to lead a dedicated Secrets Security Program. Their responsibilities:
- Audit and inventory all secrets
- Define organizational policies and standards
- Establish access controls and rotation schedules
- Implement automation across the toolchain
- Monitor and respond to incidents
- Assign clear roles across your organization:
- Cloud Security: Secure platform secrets
- Application Security: Ensure secure usage in SDLC
- IAM: Govern privileged access
- Security Operations: Monitor and respond to incidents
- Data Security: Manage encryption keys
- Risk and Compliance: Align with regulations
- Conduct a comprehensive secrets audit.
- Build a centralized inventory.
- Define clear policies and best practices aligned with your risk appetite.
- Implement automated solutions that integrate with your development pipeline and cloud platforms. Make adoption easy for developers.
- Continuously monitor for anomalies and maintain a dedicated incident response plan.
This approach ensures secrets management gets the attention it deserves. Your task force will break down silos, foster collaboration, and drive a comprehensive strategy. By addressing both technology and human elements, you’ll effectively mitigate the risks of secrets sprawl.
To identify gaps and areas for improvement in your current secrets management approach, ask the following questions
- Visibility: How many secrets truly exist across our applications, clouds, DevOps pipelines, and data centers? Do we have the means to discover the full scope?
- Exposure: Can we automatically rotate exposed secrets before attackers leverage access? Do we continuously monitor for leaked credentials?
- Access: Are robust controls, auditing, and approval workflows in place to gate and monitor access to our most privileged and sensitive secrets? Is usage tied to identity?
- Rotation: Do we have standardized processes to rotate secrets on a regular cadence and/or on-demand in the event of a potential compromise?
- Integration: Is secrets management embedded seamlessly into developer workflows and tooling? Can we consistently broker just-in-time secrets access across the full stack?
- Compliance: How are we ensuring secrets controls align with regulatory requirements like GDPR, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, etc.? Can we generate compliant audit trails?
- Incident Response: Do we have a dedicated playbook for rapidly investigating and mitigating potential secrets-related breaches or abuse? Are clear roles defined?
- Ownership: Who is ultimately accountable for securing different classes of secrets across teams, applications, and environments? Are expectations and metrics defined?
Probing these areas will reveal critical gaps in your people, processes, and technology. Don’t let these issues fester—they’re potential blind spots that could leave you vulnerable.
Use these questions to guide your strategy. They’ll help you prioritize improvements and build a mature secrets management program that truly protects your organization.
Traditional, fragmented approaches can’t keep pace with the complexity of cloud-native operations.
Organizations need a centralized solution that provides constant visibility, control, and protection for all credentials across every environment.
Akeyless offers such a unified approach to secrets management, functioning as a consolidated command center for identity security. Their platform enables organizations to manage secrets securely throughout their lifecycle with several key features:
- SaaS delivery model: This ensures easy access and scalability while maintaining high security through Distributed Fragments Cryptography (DFC). Organizations can manage secrets at scale without compromising security, and Akeyless cannot access customer secrets, reinforcing data privacy.
- Secure secrets storage: Using Zero Trust encryption principles, this feature ensures only authorized users can access or manage stored secrets.
- Granular access control: Role-based access control (RBAC) and just-in-time access reduce the risk of standing privileges, aligning with least privilege principles.
- Automated secrets rotation: On-demand or scheduled rotation helps meet security and compliance requirements.
- DevOps integration: Seamless integration with DevOps and GitOps workflows facilitates adoption across IT ecosystems.
- Comprehensive auditing: Detailed access and activity logs simplify compliance efforts.
- Transparent pricing: Akeyless offers a straightforward pricing model without hidden fees.
This strategic approach allows organizations to scale their protection as their environment grows, maintaining full control over their secrets. By addressing secrets management gaps holistically, enterprises can tackle the challenges posed by uncontrolled secrets sprawl. Akeyless aims to empower CISOs to safeguard their organization’s critical assets, enabling secure and confident innovation.
As a CISO, you’ve seen the headlines. Cloudflare. Uber. Microsoft. Each breach a stark reminder of what’s at stake.
Your team is drowning in a sea of credentials. Passwords, API keys, certificates – multiplying faster than you can track. It’s not just humans anymore. Machines now outnumber your workforce 45 to 1, each needing its own set of keys.
You’ve tried patching the holes. A tool here, a process there. But the cracks are widening. Your developers are cutting corners. Your auditors are raising flags. And somewhere out there, an attacker is probing your defenses.
The old ways aren’t working. Not in this world of cloud, microservices, and continuous deployment. You need a new approach. One that brings order to the chaos. That scales with your ambitions, not against them.
It’s time to take control. To turn this tide of digital secrets from a liability into a strength. Your board is watching. Your customers are counting on you.
The path forward exists. Companies like yours are already taking the first steps. They’re unifying their approach, automating the tedious, and empowering their teams.
Don’t let the next breach be yours. Reach out for a demo and learn how you can secure your organization’s digital future!
