What it means to build 'secure defaults' into your workflow

TL;DR

Secure defaults are your first line of defense. This blog covers how to build systems that protect themselves by default, blocking unsafe access, rejecting misconfigurations, and requiring secrets to be handled correctly. Learn how small oversights can lead to serious breaches and how the right defaults help catch issues early and reduce long-term risk.

Most systems don’t get hacked through obvious failures. They run smoothly, pass tests, deployments go live, and nobody questions the default configurations or behaviors. But behind that false sense of stability, the system could already be exposed. Secure-by-default systems are built for this reality. They protect the system by blocking unsafe behavior before it ever becomes a risk.

This article breaks down what secure defaults actually look like in real systems, how to design for them from the start, and what can go wrong when they’re missing. You'll see how small oversights can turn into major security issues and how setting the right defaults can prevent problems before they happen.

What are secure defaults?

Secure defaults are the built-in settings or behaviors of a system that prioritize software security right out of the box, without requiring the user to configure anything manually. Even if a developer forgets something, skips a step, or misconfigures a setting, the system still leans toward safety.

Secure software development aligns closely with the idea of a fail-safe system. Both approaches assume that when something is incomplete or broken, the safest move is to block access or shut things down.

In practice, that might look like:

• An application refusing to start unless secrets or tokens are provided through the environment or config
• Denying access by default until roles and permissions are explicitly set
• Rejecting input unless it passes strict validation, rather than silently accepting bad or incomplete data

Flowchart showing secure behavior paths

The goal is to make unsafe behavior difficult, if not impossible.

What happens when defaults aren’t secure

Small mistakes in your software development lifecycle can lead to security breaches and expose sensitive information. For example, developers often hardcode secrets during testing due to insecure defaults, then accidentally push them to production. Teams sometimes leave Identity and access management (IAM) roles wide open because scoping permissions takes extra time. These gaps often bypass proper security practices and result in software vulnerabilities going undetected until it’s too late.

In May 2025, Commvault confirmed that attackers exploited a zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2025-3928) in its Azure-hosted Metallic web server. This allowed them to access client secrets exposed in the environment, granting unauthorized entry into Microsoft 365 systems. That same month, TeleMessage mistakenly exposed a Spring Boot actuator /heapdump endpoint in production, allowing a remote attacker to download memory dumps containing usernames, passwords, encryption keys, and even government-related data. Both breaches stemmed from systems running insecure configurations and secrets that went unnoticed.

When a system runs with exposed secrets, broad permissions, or missing checks and nothing breaks, teams assume it's safe. That assumption spreads into new services, CI pipelines, and production builds. Fixing it later means cleanup, patches, and rebuilding broken trust. Secure defaults don’t make systems bulletproof, but they make unsafe behavior impossible to ignore. Without them, risk becomes the norm, and no one notices until it's already a problem.

How to handle secrets securely by default

Secrets are one of the most common places where insecure defaults sneak in. Most breaches involving credentials happen because something was left exposed, logged, or misconfigured. A secure-by-default system helps development teams enforce security requirements from the start, without relying on memory, discipline, or manual processes.

Here’s what that should look like:

How to handle secrets securely by default

Use a secrets manager

A secure default system should never rely on .env files, hardcoded secrets, or manual copy-paste to handle sensitive values. While .env files are fine for local development, they are easy to mishandle and not secure by default. A safer approach is to load secrets at runtime from a proper secrets manager. This prevents common issues like secrets being committed to source control, logged accidentally, or baked into container images.

Good tools for managing secrets securely include Doppler, AWS Secrets Manager, HashiCorp Vault, Azure Key Vault, and GCP Secret Manager. These tools are essential for any organization looking to perform secure software development and ensure software integrity across environments. Along with secure storage and access control, they help you inject secrets into your runtime environment without exposing them in code or config files. For example, with Doppler CLI, you can launch your app with secrets loaded securely like this:

This keeps secrets in memory, avoids writing anything to disk, and works consistently across local, staging, and production environments.

Crash if required secrets are missing

Even when using a secrets manager, it’s easy to overlook defining a required secret. A secure-by-default system should treat this as a critical failure. Crashing early is one of the simplest yet most effective security measures you can take during the development lifecycle to prevent future vulnerabilities. If your app starts without something essential, like an API key, database password, or JWT signing key, it should crash immediately. Never fall back to dummy values or silently skip checks.

Letting the app boot without complaining sends the wrong signal that everything is fine, when in reality, it’s running misconfigured and potentially insecure. However, failing fast prevents the system from entering an unpredictable or vulnerable state. It surfaces the problem early and makes it nearly impossible to deploy insecure setups without someone noticing.

No logging of secrets

Most developers are guilty of logging environment variables to the console just for testing, and it’s easy to forget and push that code to production. What feels like a harmless debug step in development can end up leaking secrets into logs that get stored and shared across systems. If those logs are ever exposed, your secrets are out in the wild. Leaked credentials in logs can also expose other security vulnerabilities and violate organization-level security policies.

Treat secrets as toxic data that should never appear in logs, stack traces, or error outputs. Turn verbose logging off in production. Use logging tools that support redaction and filtering out of the box, such as Winston or Pino in Node.js. You can also use utilities like AWS CloudWatch Filters or Datadog Sensitive Data Scanner to scrub logs before they are sent out. Set rules to block common secret patterns, and be cautious with third-party libraries that may automatically log request bodies or environment data.

Permissions over convenience

Not every part of your system needs access to every secret. Scope secrets tightly by giving each module, service, or function access only to what it actually needs. This limits the damage if something is compromised and makes access management and risk analysis simpler and more reliable.

Additionally, use separate secrets per environment, service, and even instance when possible. That way, rotating or revoking a secret won't break unrelated parts of the system. Following the least privilege principle is one of the core secure coding practices that every team should adopt to reduce attack surfaces. This principle does not stop at secrets. It should apply across the board, i.e., to users, services, roles, APIs, and databases.

How to enforce least privilege in access control by default

A secure-by-default system should start with zero access. There should be no implicit permissions, broad roles, or assumptions. Access to systems, APIs, or data must be explicitly granted. This applies to both users and services. A new role, user, or microservice should start with nothing and receive only the access it needs to function.

To apply least privilege:

• Create task-specific roles. Avoid broad roles like admin or full-access, which give more permissions than needed.
• Separate access by environment. Development should never have access to production resources.
• Assign roles to services, not just users. Treat services like first-class actors and scope their access accordingly.
• Audit permissions regularly. Revoke unused access so old roles or tokens don't become backdoors.

Defaulting to the least privilege ensures that even if someone skips a step or forgets to configure access, the system remains secure rather than overexposed.

Tools like Doppler support this approach with role-based access control, project and environment scoping, and scoped service tokens. You can give users read-only or limited write access, control which secrets they can view, and restrict tokens to specific configs. With audit logs and token expiration, Doppler makes enforcing least privilege easier and more reliable across teams.

How to shift your workflow toward secure software development

Secure software development doesn’t mean much if it only lives in your docs or people’s heads. To make them stick, you need to bake them into your daily workflow, into how you write, review, deploy, and operate code. The goal is to stop depending on manual steps or good intentions and start making security the path of least resistance.

Start by updating the tools and templates your team actually uses. That means updating base configs, secure coding templates, infrastructure code, and boilerplate repos to align with secure software development frameworks. Everything should default to deny access, reject insecure setups, and fail fast when secrets or critical config are missing.

For example, make sure new apps crash on missing secrets, Dockerfiles don’t copy .env files, and CI/CD pipelines block builds with exposed tokens, weak access policies, or missing threat modeling steps. From version control and automated testing to access control and security testing, secure defaults must guide the entire software lifecycle.

If you want a faster way to implement this, Doppler makes it easy to manage secrets with least privilege and audit access, and enforce good defaults across every environment. Schedule a demo to see how it fits into your workflow without having to rethink everything.