Guide to Secrets Management
Your organization’s secrets—passwords, cryptographic keys, access tokens, or cloud service credentials—are at risk of being compromised if they’re not sufficiently managed. However, implementing effective secrets management presents a significant challenge for organizations, because it requires the right combination of software applications, internal policies, and best practices.
In this guide, we’ll dive into what secrets management should consist of, covering key definitions and foundational concepts.
What is a Secret?
Secrets go beyond credentials—they include any information that can be used to authenticate access, secure confidential files, and validate identities in interactions between users, applications, and devices. These secrets ensure that human and non-human entities can securely communicate while preventing unauthorized access.
Think of secrets as the cogs in a wheel, with the wheel being a communicable entity. For instance, if two Internet of Things (IoT) devices want to transmit data to each other, a chain of events must occur for that process to happen. This process usually involves validating secrets at every step to ensure that communication is safe, authentic, and stable. As each secret is confirmed, the cogs of both wheels start turning until they can function seamlessly with one another, performing the intended action.
Secrets come in all shapes and sizes, with varying responsibilities. They include:
Cryptographic Keys: Strings of lengthy, algorithm-generated numerical data primarily dedicated to encrypting and decrypting sensitive data.
User Credentials: User-generated or browser-generated usernames and passwords that validate users trying to access a suite of private information on the internet.
Certificates: Digitally signed documents that add enhanced authentication measures to accurately identify the validity of users, websites, and software. Ephemeral certificates are increasingly popular as an alternative passwordless option that provides extra security.
Cloud Credentials: Data used to authenticate users accessing items stored in a cloud environment. These are generated by the cloud service provider or the user requesting its services. They can include domain IDs, access and secret keys, standard username-password pairs, and more.
Database Connection Strings: Specially formatted bits of code harbored inside of software applications and used to communicate with databases. They include keyword value pairs connected by equal signs and separated by semi-colons, all in clear text format.
Access Tokens: Objects that carry and share authenticated user information to applications to trigger an application programming interface (API) request and enable users to perform particular tasks.
API Keys: Code that identifies and validates users requesting access to an application and enforces their access privileges.
Each of these secrets serves a specific function in your environment, but they all share the same requirement: robust protection. The diversity of secrets across applications, systems, and user roles adds to the challenge of managing them effectively.
Why Secrets Management Is Critical for IT and OT Environments
Secrets management ensures the secure handling, storage, and transmission of sensitive credentials, allowing only authorized users and systems to access critical assets. It applies to on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments, protecting operational security and ensuring compliance with regulatory frameworks like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), or the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS).
Secrets management focuses on data security and consists of many moving parts that combine to comprehensively manage and secure credentials, software programs, resources, assets, and machines. It can involve Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Privileged Access Management (PAM) integration, robust internal IT policies, informational hygiene practices, and other automated solutions that improve visibility, scalability, and control over how secrets are used and who has access to them.
Consider this: a user could have a highly complex, hard-to-crack password, but its efficacy goes to waste if that same user shares it with others via email or accidentally leaks it due to poor IT practices. Worse still, often discouraged by the amount of groundwork that needs to be covered with secrets management, organizations may relax their approach to managing and securing credentials across their entire informational infrastructure.
In IT landscapes, stolen secrets can lead to hacked accounts, identity theft, privacy violations, reputational damage, and catastrophic financial losses. In OT environments, the consequences of misused secrets can turn fatal, with malicious hackers inflicting physical damage by remotely controlling connected machinery.
However, effective secrets management can do more than just mitigate risks—it strengthens IT security, prevents breaches, and enables seamless operations across complex infrastructures. Automated processes for handling secrets eliminate human error, while centralized management simplifies auditing and monitoring. This allows you to focus on scaling systems and innovating without compromising security.
Secrets Managers: The Core of Effective Secrets Management
A secrets manager centralizes access to an organization’s valuable assets while safely storing all the sensitive data needed to use and configure them. It allows administrators to generate SSH keys and passwords, assign access roles, manage credentials, and dispose of secrets at the end of their lifecycle, closing any possible security gaps that might otherwise go unnoticed.
One of the core advantages of a secrets management solution is centralization. Without it, secrets often sprawl across multiple platforms, applications, and repositories, making tracking and securing them difficult. A secrets manager consolidates these into a single, encrypted vault, streamlining management and reducing vulnerabilities.
Using a secrets manager offers several tangible benefits such as enhancing security by centralizing and encrypting credentials to reduce the risk of leaks and unauthorized access. It also improves operational efficiency by automating key management tasks like rotation and expiration—minimizing human errors and saving time. Secrets managers also help organizations meet compliance requirements and enforce strict access controls by maintaining detailed logs and reports.
Additionally, automation reduces security risks by eliminating manual credential handling and preventing errors like hardcoded secrets or mismanaged access. As organizations scale across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, secrets managers ensure seamless secret management and adaptation to evolving security needs.
A robust secrets management solution comes equipped with features that address both security and operational needs:
Centralized Vaults: These act as encrypted repositories where all secrets are stored. By consolidating secrets into a single location, you reduce risks associated with secret sprawl and simplify credential access.
Automated Secret Rotation: Regularly rotating credentials is important to limit the potential damage from a compromised secret. Automation ensures this process occurs without disrupting workflows or requiring manual oversight.
Access Controls and Role Management: Secrets managers enforce the principle of least privilege through role-based access control (RBAC). You can grant granular permissions, ensuring only the right users and applications access specific secrets.
Monitoring and Auditing: Real-time monitoring detects unusual or unauthorized access attempts. Detailed audit logs provide a historical record of secret usage, supporting both compliance efforts and forensic investigations.
Integration Capabilities: Seamlessly integrating with Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Privileged Access Management (PAM) systems improves security. Compatibility with hybrid and multi-cloud environments ensures smooth operation across diverse infrastructures.
Scalability: As enterprises grow, their secrets management must evolve. A good secrets manager scales alongside your organization by supporting dynamic infrastructures, including containerized applications and cloud-native setups.
It is important to understand that a secrets manager alone can only do so much in today’s bustling, scalable, and highly interconnected IT and OT networks. Employees must also do their part to prevent common security pitfalls. Adherence to internal security policies, careful attention, and a well-established list of best practices are key to keeping everyone on the same page.
Best Practices for Exceptional Secrets Management
1. Categorize and Encrypt Secrets at All Stages
Organizing secrets by content type and use helps teams manage credentials efficiently, allowing administrators to troubleshoot issues quickly and nullify compromised secrets. Categorization reduces credential clutter and provides a clearer picture of how each secret type is used throughout an enterprise. This is especially useful for companies operating in in-house and cloud-based environments where secret management is more complex.
Once categorized, encryption protects secrets—whether at rest, in transit, or during runtime. Ideally, secrets should always be encrypted with strong encryption standards like AES-256 so that if they leak, they appear indecipherable. Otherwise, they remain in plain text format, making it far easier for hackers to misuse them.
2. Limit Privileged Access and Optimize Permissions
Overprivileged accounts create security risks by enabling unauthorized access or insider threats. Practice the principle of least privilege, which sets user permissions with just enough access to perform their authorized tasks. Many secrets managers also provide auditing tools to help administrators detect unauthorized use of secrets and permission settings for better threat prevention.
To best keep secrets private, organizations should limit the number of employees with privileged access to a master list or comprehensive roles within a secrets manager. This significantly reduces the chances of human error and suspicious internal behavior that may go unnoticed. Smaller privileged circles improve accountability, making activities more visible and reinforcing compliance with security policies.
When it comes to identity credentials, try to switch up where and how you store them. Harboring usernames, passwords, and keys in the same places makes their location predictable, should a hacker breach your organization’s IT infrastructure.
Role-based access control (RBAC) further simplifies permission management by grouping users into predefined roles instead of assigning individual permissions. A "Developer" role may access only non-production secrets, while a "DevOps Engineer" could handle deployment-related credentials. An "Administrator" role would oversee all secrets but with closely monitored privileges.
3. Monitor and Strengthen Chains of Trust
Certificate chains of trust are afflicted with vulnerabilities at every touchpoint, making x.509 certificates and SSH keys crucial sources of validation and security as users connect to sites and servers. However, it’s worth keeping an eye out for any gaps these tools may not fully address. Dedicate time to monitor authentication procedures regularly to prevent untrusted networks from being tapped into and cyber-criminals from sneaking in.
Regular validation and renewal of certificates are essential. Certificates like TLS/SSL have finite lifespans, and expired ones can lead to security breaches or service disruptions. Renewing them before expiration keeps the chain of trust intact and secure.
Automation reduces human error by streamlining certificate and key lifecycle management, including issuance, renewal, and revocation. Automated tools help maintain compliance with security protocols and ensure faster, error-free processing.
Auditing is another critical step in managing trust. Proactively evaluate third-party certificates to ensure they align with internal security standards. This includes reviewing issuing certificate authorities, cryptographic methods, and policy compliance to prevent vulnerabilities and security gaps.
4. Ensure Seamless Integration with IAM and PAM
IAM manages user identities, verifies access requests, and enforces authentication policies. It supports the principle of least privilege and reduces the risk of unauthorized access to secrets by centralizing identity data. PAM controls privileged accounts, restricting how elevated access is used and minimizing the attack surface for breaches. It also provides detailed auditing capabilities, allowing organizations to track how privileged credentials are accessed and used.
IAM and PAM should work seamlessly with the secrets manager you choose to implement. While IAM focuses on strengthening identity authentication measures, PAM centers on the level of access a user is given once they are authenticated. Both systems serve distinct but complementary roles in safeguarding access.
Since secrets management solutions safeguard sensitive data, seamless IAM and PAM integration automates security protocols to cover all vulnerable areas without compromising efficiency. This integration enhances automated access control, operational efficiency, and centralized visibility, reducing manual effort and improving security oversight.
5. Adopt Zero Trust Architecture
The Zero Trust security model operates on a principle of no implicit trust by requiring continuous verification of every access request, regardless of whether it originates from inside or outside your network. Applying this model to secrets management ensures that sensitive credentials remain protected and accessible only to authorized users and systems. Enforcing strict access controls helps organizations reduce risks associated with over-privileged access, credential theft, and data breaches.
Micro-segmentation strengthens Zero Trust by isolating access to secrets based on roles, tasks, or applications. This approach creates smaller, independent security zones, preventing attackers from pivoting to other sensitive data if one section is compromised. By containing access, organizations limit the potential damage of a security incident and enhance secrets management resilience.
Monitoring, auditing, and adaptive authentication further reinforce Zero Trust principles. Logging and evaluating every access request helps detect anomalies and unauthorized attempts, enabling quick corrective actions. Multi-factor authentication (MFA) increases security by analyzing contextual factors like location, device, and behavior, ensuring secrets remain protected without disrupting user experience.
6. Transition to Passwordless Authentication
Passwordless authentication enhances security by eliminating traditional passwords and replacing them with biometrics, cryptographic keys, or hardware tokens. Passwords are a major security risk, frequently compromised through phishing, brute force attacks, and poor user practices. Transitioning to passwordless methods reduces vulnerabilities and strengthens access control.
This approach improves security and user experience by reducing the attack surface and simplifying authentication. Threat exposure decreases without passwords to steal or reuse, while users benefit from faster, more intuitive login methods like fingerprint scans, facial recognition, or security keys. Secrets managers support this transition by securely storing cryptographic keys and tokens, ensuring seamless authentication workflows.
Implementing passwordless authentication requires a strategic, phased approach. Starting with high-risk areas, such as privileged accounts or remote work environments, minimizes password-based attack vectors. Gradually expanding adoption allows organizations to troubleshoot issues, train users, and ensure system compatibility, strengthening security without disrupting operations.
Enjoy World-Class Secrets Management With SSH’s PrivX™ and UKM
Secrets management is essential for protecting sensitive information and maintaining secure operations. Implementing best practices such as encrypting secrets, restricting privileged access, and integrating with IAM and PAM reduces security risks and strengthens compliance. A well-structured approach safeguards critical assets, prevents breaches, and ensures long-term security in complex digital environments.
To help you start building a robust data security framework, SSH offers PrivX™ Hybrid PAM for secure access credential management and our Universal SSH Key Manager (UKM) for SSH key maintenance and protection.
PrivX™ Hybrid PAM is highly interoperable, functioning flawlessly across multi-cloud environments and OT frameworks. It’s scalable, AI-driven, user-friendly, and cost-efficient, saving organizations time while providing reliable credential security.
UKM automates key rotation, discovers vulnerabilities, and manages exhaustive key inventories with additional authentication features to restrict key access. Machine-to-machine interactions are also safely monitored with UKM—a common gap many PAM solutions overlook. Moreover, UKM and PrivX both align with industry standards and regulations to keep your organization compliant.
Both PrivX and UKM leverage passwordless authentication, allowing you to manage your existing credentials while transitioning to a fully passwordless and keyless environment at a pace that suits you. Together, they combine into a powerful Zero Trust Access Management solution.
Ready to see these solutions in action? Reach out to us or request a personalized demo today to learn more about how SSH can keep your secrets safe.
FAQ
What is secrets management?
Secrets management is the secure handling, storage, and transmission of sensitive credentials like passwords, API keys, and encryption keys. It ensures that only authorized users and systems can access critical resources while preventing unauthorized access and data breaches.
Why is secrets management important?
Secrets management protects sensitive data, reduces the risk of breaches, supports regulatory compliance, and enables secure operations across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. It also strengthens security posture by limiting exposure to unauthorized access and automating credential management.
What are examples of secrets in IT environments?
Examples include passwords for user authentication, API keys for software integration, encryption keys for securing data, certificates for verifying network identities, and SSH keys for secure server access. These secrets are critical to ensuring system integrity and data confidentiality.
How do secrets managers improve security?
Secrets managers centralize credential storage in encrypted vaults, automate secret rotation, enforce role-based access controls, and monitor access for unusual behavior. These features reduce risks associated with credential sprawl, human error, and unauthorized access.
What are best practices for secrets management?
Best practices include encrypting secrets, categorizing them by type and use, limiting privileged access, integrating with IAM and PAM systems, adopting Zero Trust models, and transitioning to passwordless authentication for improved security and user experience.
