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Sure there's always a cost / benefit balance to take into account. That said I'd say putting secrets in a git repo is a pretty risky thing to do. By the natur

Sure there's always a cost / benefit balance to take into account. That said I'd say putting secrets in a git repo is a pretty risky thing to do. By the nature of the tool that means that the secret ends up on the device(s) of every developer who checks out the codebase, so the security of the secrets is equal to the security of the worst secured device in question.

jameshart 10y ago
Also, there's a surprising number of websites out there with a .git directory in the root...
Xylakant 10y ago
> That said I'd say putting secrets in a git repo is a pretty risky thing to do Storing and keeping secrets is a pretty risky thing in general. Think: small team, small app, everybody has the secrets anyways for deployment purposes. Sure, setting up vault is superior - but how much effort does that cost that could be invested in a better solution. Or a puppet repo that you use to provision your machines, shared in the ops team: small team, everbody has root - on each machine there might be an ssh key that gives away all your secrets. So better invest in solid FDE and maybe tie that to a TF device, a yubikey that is required to decrypt the disk etc. Not perfect by all means, but there's limited time to go around and you really should think about what threats you want/can defend against. (for example, for most projects, I'm not wasting any thought about defenses against a nation state actor, that's a threat that I won't be able to meaningfully counter anyways).
- raesene6 10y ago
  FDE's and Yubikeys are nice and good controls for some classes of risk, but distributing your passwords onto dev laptops via a git repo. opens you up to a wide range of risks that those won't help you with. Unless you got super-corporate lockdown with the end point devices you have risks like "A user with access to the repo. installs software which turns out to be malware", "A user with access to the repo. leaves their laptop in a coffee shop unlocked", "A user with access to the repo. puts it on a USB key and loses the key". None of these are nation state level concerns, they're things that could impact the project purely by accident, or at the hands of low-skill attackers The point is once you've allowed secrets to be in a distributed system like this you have very little control over what happens to them, which is why I'd recommend using a secrets management system where there's more control (e.g. vault from hashicorp) in almost all circumstances.

jameshart 10y ago

Also, there's a surprising number of websites out there with a .git directory in the root...

Xylakant 10y ago

> That said I'd say putting secrets in a git repo is a pretty risky thing to do Storing and keeping secrets is a pretty risky thing in general. Think: small team, small app, everybody has the secrets anyways for deployment purposes. Sure, setting up vault is superior - but how much effort does that cost that could be invested in a better solution. Or a puppet repo that you use to provision your machines, shared in the ops team: small team, everbody has root - on each machine there might be an ssh key that gives away all your secrets. So better invest in solid FDE and maybe tie that to a TF device, a yubikey that is required to decrypt the disk etc. Not perfect by all means, but there's limited time to go around and you really should think about what threats you want/can defend against. (for example, for most projects, I'm not wasting any thought about defenses against a nation state actor, that's a threat that I won't be able to meaningfully counter anyways).

raesene6 10y ago
FDE's and Yubikeys are nice and good controls for some classes of risk, but distributing your passwords onto dev laptops via a git repo. opens you up to a wide range of risks that those won't help you with. Unless you got super-corporate lockdown with the end point devices you have risks like "A user with access to the repo. installs software which turns out to be malware", "A user with access to the repo. leaves their laptop in a coffee shop unlocked", "A user with access to the repo. puts it on a USB key and loses the key". None of these are nation state level concerns, they're things that could impact the project purely by accident, or at the hands of low-skill attackers The point is once you've allowed secrets to be in a distributed system like this you have very little control over what happens to them, which is why I'd recommend using a secrets management system where there's more control (e.g. vault from hashicorp) in almost all circumstances.