Why “Just rotate the secret” is easier said than done

TL;DR

Secrets rotation is essential for modern security, but in practice, it is often inefficient and risky. Manual processes, fear of downtime, and increasing complexity prevent many teams from rotating secrets consistently. This guide explains why rotation is so challenging and how to automate it with best practices that improve both security and developer velocity.

​​What is secrets rotation?

Secrets rotation is the process of regularly updating credentials such as API keys, passwords, and certificates to reduce the risk of misuse. Effective rotation limits the lifespan of credentials so that if a secret is exposed, its window of vulnerability is minimized.

Rotation also helps ensure compliance with standards like SOC 2, PCI DSS, and NIST, which often require strong credential management practices.

Why does secrets rotation matter?

Without rotation, secrets can go stale, remaining valid long after they should have been updated. This leaves sensitive systems exposed to risk from former employees, outdated services, or malicious actors.

When rotation is part of a well-automated workflow, teams can maintain strong security posture without slowing down development or causing downtime.

​​The real-world impact if secrets aren’t rotated

Secrets rotation is a standard DevOps security practice used in diverse circumstances. Or at least, it’s supposed to be. In reality, secrets rotation is often waylaid with such inefficiency that teams set it aside, hoping it won’t come back to bite them. Spoiler alert: it can, and it’s an expensive bite.

Here are a few cases where secrets rotation shows obvious and immediate value:

1. The value of a secret has already leaked.

In the 2016 Uber data breach, hackers accessed a developer’s GitHub account and stole the credentials to one of Uber’s AWS data stores. Although the breach’s impact must be remediated another way, rotating the exposed credentials helps return administrative control to the organization, reducing any further access from the threat actor.

2. Reduce the risk of potential exposures.

In 2022, Slack’s security team detected suspicious activity in a GitHub account. They swiftly revoked the compromised credentials and rotated the relevant secrets in repositories exposed by those credentials. By acting quickly, Slack cut off forward momentum before damage was caused.

3. Onboard and offboard employees.

Identity management and access policies, including the ability to both grant and revoke privileged access, help avoid issues like those in the 2020 Twitter breach. Some 1500 employees had minimally restricted access to manipulating high-profile Twitter accounts, which were used in a crypto scam after being exposed in a social engineering attack. Efficient credential granting and revoking practices mean access to sensitive information can be swiftly revoked at a moment’s notice, preventing unilateral access to proprietary systems from any account.

4. Compliance with industry standards.

Many industries, particularly those dealing with sensitive personal information, require robust control over secrets to maintain legal compliance. Though Capital One’s 2019 data breach is attributed primarily to a misconfigured server, according to deeper security analysis, several industry standards were missing at various points in the extended attack chain, including a lack of trust-but-verify architecture, overprivileged access, and a lack of detection software.

5. Integration of microservices or external services.

For platforms communicating or integrating with external services, it’s important to securely authenticate and manage what entities have valid access to sensitive information. In 2022, hackers stole authentication tokens from a third-party service related to GitHub, granting access to private repositories. These repositories stored secrets, potentially granting further access to more sensitive information. Rotating credentials, even those in secure storage, and especially those granted to third-party services, helps mitigate the risk of these attacks.

The common denominator of these processes is secrets lifecycle management. Secrets lifecycle management refers to the creation, storage, management, and revocation of secrets in a controlled and efficient manner. Tracking a secret through its entire lifecycle reduces exposure risk and facilitates easier rotation practices.

Why secrets rotation just doesn’t happen

There are plenty of reasons routine secrets rotation doesn’t happen, but the primary driving force behind this issue is inefficiency. Security teams want to rotate secrets routinely, and developers are willing to work with them. However, without the proper tools, the task is so monumentally inefficient that it gets pushed to the side in favor of other, more pressing tasks. Let’s take a look at the three most common vectors of inefficiency in secrets rotation:

Lack of automation

Without automated processes, every action in secrets management must be done manually. These steps include: Changing the value of the secret, locating every instance of the secret, updating the new value across every instance, and syncing the updated value between all developers in every environment. These actions may be quick for a few developers working in a single environment, but as soon as the team expands, this quickly spirals out of control. It’s not just a frustrating problem, either. Every hour spent on secrets management is an hour of paid labor that isn’t going towards improving the product.

Fear of downtime

Many secrets are part of the customer-facing application, and any downtime associated with rotating those secrets becomes downtime for the product. This is usually unacceptable for the bottom line, but it also affects the company’s reputation for reliability, development efficiency, and much more.

Complexity of the ecosystem

Both problems mentioned above scale poorly with the complexity of the operational ecosystem. Multi-cloud platforms, hybrid or remote work environments, and integrated microservices make the secrets management landscape more complex than ever. Tracking down secrets that connect disparate parts of the application and changing their value in each location is as error-prone as it is inefficient. As teams grow and applications introduce more microservices, secrets rotation falls to the wayside as a casualty of increased complexity.

Features to look for in an enterprise secrets management solution

An enterprise secrets management solution should clean up these inefficiencies so developers can get back to what they were hired to do. Let’s look at some of the features that enable secret rotation without introducing downtime or wasting time and money.

These features work in tandem to automate the secrets management workload, reduce or eliminate operational downtime, and maintain clarity in a complex environment. An enterprise secrets management solution uses these features and more to make “just rotating the secret” as easy to do as it is to say.

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