“Unlocking Simplicity: HashiCorp Vault’s New Sync Secret Feature”

Hashicorp vault, a renowned tool for managing secrets has recently introduced a new feature that is set to revolutionize the way we handle secrets: the Sync Secrets feature. This Feature allows Vault to maintain a one-way sync for Kv(v2) secrets into various destinations.

What is Sync Secret?
The Sync Secret is designed to help with situations where fetching secrets directly from vault enterprise gets impractical. With this, Vault remains the system of records but can cache a subset of secrets on various external systems acting as trusted last mile deliver systems. This means that if a secret value is updated in Vault the secret is updated in the destination as well.

How does it work?

The Sync Secret requires activation through a one-time trigger. Once Activated secrets can be synced into Various external systems referred to as destinations. The supported destinations include AWS secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault, GCP Secret Manager, GitHub Repository secrets.

The process of syncing a secret into one of these external systems is done by creating a connection between Vault and a destination which is called as association. Each association keeps track of that secrets current sync status, timestamp of its last status change and the error code of the last sync or unsync operation if it failed. Each secret could have any number of secret associations.

Why is it Important?

The Sync Secrets is a significant step towards centralizing the governance and control of secrets that are stored within other secret managers. It helps organization manage secrets integrity by providing a single source of truth and controlling the distribution of secrets.

In today’s multi-tenant cloud environment, secrets management could become complicated, limiting visibility, fostering inconsistent management and compounding challenges with governance and compliance. The sync Secret addresses these challenges by providing a unified platform for managing secrets across multiple secret managers, CI / CD tools and platforms.

Perception:

Use case for this feature is varied in terms of the way we manage secrets in our organization. But a common use case is to maintain the integrity of secrets as many times we get into conflicts on where to maintain ‘the single source of truth’.

references: Official Documentation