Level up DevSecOps with Chef Integrations for Secrets Management
Secrets management tools are used by DevSecOps practitioners to manage and maintain user accessibility and authentication methods for digital applications and services. These include tools that manage passwords, tokens, and secret keys. Chef integrates with a range of secrets management tools such as Akeyless, Azure, AWS, and Hashi Vault to empower enterprises with scalable secrets management.
What is Zero Trust?
The phrase ‘Zero Trust’ is based on the assumption that trust is a security vulnerability and the security strategy of any organization therefore should be based on the concept of verifying users, devices, and data at every access point. Mobile technology and cloud migration plans have further increased the network perimeter of organizations. This means, more entry points for hackers to access sensitive information across SaaS, IaaS, remote users, and more. Zero Trust model ensures that security policies are applied not based on assumed trust, but on context established through least-privileged access controls and strict user authentication.
Chef and Akeyless
Akeyless Vault Platform is a secrets management solution that manages authentication credentials, certificates, tokens, and keys. The platform conforms to standardized regulations that include PCI-DSS, GDPR, FCA and more. Chef integrates with Akeyless using Chef Cookbook and existing OSS Vault community plugins.
- Integrating Akeyless with Chef Infra mitigates risk when using authorized secrets to automated infrastructure deployments.
- Chef InSpec and Akeyless work together to eliminate the use of SSH private keys.
- Akeyless platform provides analytics and reporting through dashboards for a centralized perspective.
Chef and Hashi Vault
HashiCorp Vault's encryption-as-a-service protects critical systems and sensitive data to help mitigate the risk of data breaches. The service provides identity-based cloud security automation as well. Vault validates identity against trusted sources – Kubernetes, Active Directory, Cloud Foundry, LDAP, and cloud platforms.
Integrating Chef with Hashi Vault helps automate secrets management.
There are three ways to do this:
With Chef and Hashi Vault you can:
- Centralize secrets management across different teams in the organization.
- Eliminate manual secrets management, automate, and scale quickly
- Reduce security risks and authentication errors
Chef and AWS Secrets Manager
AWS Secrets Manager enables easy management of API keys, user credentials, and other secret tokens to access applications and IT resources. The Secrets Manager APIs can retrieve secrets quickly. The Secrets Manager automatically rotates database credentials for AWS services such as Amazon RDS and Amazon DocumentDB.
Chef integrates with AWS Secrets Manager using the secrets helper. The Chef secrets helper is used to fetch secrets from AWS Secrets Manager.
Chef and Azure Key Vault
Azure Key Vault stores secrets securely on the cloud. The Vault controls access to credentials, API keys, tokens, and certificates. The Chef secrets helper supports fetching secrets from Key Vault using its respective access key and ID.
Secrets management is a critical component of DevOps
Secrets management is a critical component of DevOps. Automating the processes involved in creating, validating, and integrating secrets management will enforce security and compliance into the CI/CD pipeline. Chef Infra and Chef InSpec can easily integrate with any secrets management platform to ensure authentication credentials, API keys, tokens and other types of secrets are secure and easily retrieved when needed.
