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Secret Manager Best practices
Summary
This guide introduces some best practices for using Google Cloud Secret Manager, such as access control, credential authentication, coding practices, and administration. It recommends following the principle of least privilege when granting permissions, segmenting applications and environments into separate projects, and using the automatic replication policy when creating secrets. It also suggests avoiding passing secrets through the filesystem or environment variables, pinning to a version number when updating secrets, and monitoring secrets across the organization. Lastly, it suggests estimating peak secret usage and requesting an increase if necessary.
Q&As
What are some best practices for using Secret Manager?
Some best practices for using Secret Manager include following the principle of least privilege when granting permissions to secrets, segmenting applications and environments into separate projects, using secret level IAM bindings or IAM Conditions to limit access, and using Application Default Credentials when developing locally.
What access control methods should be used to protect secrets?
Access control methods that should be used to protect secrets include IAM, secret level IAM bindings, IAM Conditions, and IAM Recommender.
What credentials are required to authenticate to the Secret Manager API?
Credentials required to authenticate to the Secret Manager API include Application Default Credentials, gcloud auth application-default login, instance metadata server, and workload identity.
How should secrets be passed to applications?
Secrets should be passed to applications through the Secret Manager API directly, using one of the provided client libraries, or by following the REST or GRPC documentation.
What administration methods should be used when creating and managing secrets?
Administration methods that should be used when creating and managing secrets include choosing the automatic replication policy when creating secrets, referencing secrets by their version number, disabling secret versions before destroying them or deleting secrets, setting expiration on production secrets only if certain it should be irreversibly deleted, periodically rotating secrets, monitoring secrets across the organization, and estimating peak secret usage and ensuring the project has enough quota.
AI Comments
👍 This article provides a thorough overview of best practices when using Secret Manager, providing useful information on access control, coding practices, administration and more.
👎 This article could be better organized, as the topics discussed are not in a logical order and it can be difficult to follow the flow of the article.
AI Discussion
Me: It's about best practices when using Secret Manager. It talks about access control, coding practices, administration, and monitoring secrets across an organization.
Friend: Wow, that's really thorough. What implications do you think this article has?
Me: Well, I think it's important for companies to take these best practices into consideration when using Secret Manager. It's essential to have the proper access control, coding practices, and administration in place to keep secrets secure. Also, monitoring secrets across an organization can help identify any non-conformance to organization requirements. It's a good idea to keep up with the latest security practices to ensure data is safe and secure.
Action items
- Review the platform overview and Secret Manager overview to understand the Google Cloud landscape.
- Follow the principle of least privilege when granting permissions to secrets and use secret level IAM bindings or IAM Conditions to limit access to the necessary subset of secrets.
- Set up a VPC Service Controls perimeter for your organization to limit access to the Secret Manager API. Estimate peak secret usage and ensure that your project has enough quota to handle such an event. Request an increase if more quota is needed.
Technical terms
- IAM
- Identity and Access Management. A system used to manage user access to resources.
- Least Privilege
- A security principle that states that users should only be given the minimum amount of access necessary to perform their job.
- Resource Hierarchy
- A system of organizing resources in a hierarchical structure.
- IAM Binding
- A method of granting access to resources based on user identity.
- Application Default Credentials
- A set of credentials used to authenticate to the Secret Manager API.
- Instance Metadata Server
- A server that provides information about a compute instance.
- Workload Identity
- A system used to authenticate to Google Cloud APIs.
- Workload Identity Federation
- A system used to authenticate to Google Cloud APIs using existing identity mechanisms.
- Service Account Credential
- A set of credentials used to authenticate to a service account.
- Client Libraries
- Libraries used to access the Secret Manager API.
- Directory Traversal Attack
- An attack that attempts to access files and directories that are not intended to be publicly accessible.
- Kubernetes Secrets
- A system used to store sensitive information, such as passwords, OAuth tokens, and SSH keys.
- Automatic Replication Policy
- A policy used to replicate secrets across multiple locations.
- Latest Alias
- A reference to the most recent version of a secret.
- Constraints/GCP.ResourceLocations
- A constraint used to enforce a specific location for a resource.
- Constraints/IAM.AllowedPolicyMemberDomains
- A constraint used to limit the identities that can be added to IAM policies for secrets.
- Thundering Herd
- A phenomenon that occurs when a large number of requests are made to a system at the same time.