Introducing Google Cloud’s Secret Manager

Many applications require credentials to connect to a database, API keys to invoke a service, or certificates for authentication. Managing and securing access to these secrets is often complicated by secret sprawl, poor visibility, or lack of integrations.

Secret Manager is a new Google Cloud service that provides a secure and convenient method for storing API keys, passwords, certificates, and other sensitive data. Secret Manager provides a central place and single source of truth to manage, access, and audit secrets across Google Cloud. 

Secret Manager offers many important features:

• Global names and replication: Secrets are project-global resources. You can choose between automatic and user-managed replication policies, so you control where your secret data is stored.

• First-class versioning: Secret data is immutable and most operations take place on secret versions. With Secret Manager, you can pin a secret to specific versions like 42 or floating aliases like latest.

• Principles of least privilege: Only project owners have permissions to access secrets. Other roles must explicitly be granted permissions through Cloud IAM.

• Audit logging: With Cloud Audit Logging enabled, every interaction with Secret Manager generates an audit entry. You can ingest these logs into anomaly detection systems to spot abnormal access patterns and alert on possible security breaches.  

• Strong encryption guarantees: Data is encrypted in transit with TLS and at rest with AES-256-bit encryption keys. Support for customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK) is coming soon.

• VPC Service Controls: Enable context-aware access to Secret Manager from hybrid environments with VPC Service Controls.

The Secret Manager beta is available to all Google Cloud customers today. To get started, check out the Secret Manager Quickstarts. Let's take a deeper dive into some of Secret Manager’s functionality.

Global names and replication

Early customer feedback identified that regionalization is often a pain point in existing secrets management tools, even though credentials like API keys or certificates rarely differ across cloud regions. For this reason, secret names are global within their project.

While secret names are global, the secret data is regional. Some enterprises want full control over the regions in which their secrets are stored, while others do not have a preference. Secret Manager addresses both of these customer requirements and preferences with replication policies.

• Automatic replication: The simplest replication policy is to let Google choose the regions where Secret Manager secrets should be replicated.

• User-managed replication: If given a user-managed replication policy, Secret Manager replicates secret data into all the user-supplied locations. You don’t need to install any additional software or run additional services—Google handles data replication to your specified regions. Customers who want more control over the regions where their secret data is stored should choose this replication strategy.

First-class versioning

Versioning is a core tenet of reliable systems to support gradual rollout, emergency rollback, and auditing. Secret Manager automatically versions secret data using secret versions, and most operations—like access, destroy, disable, and enable—take place on a secret version.

Production deployments should always be pinned to a specific secret version. Updating a secret should be treated in the same way as deploying a new version of the application. Rapid iteration environments like development and staging, on the other hand, can use Secret Manager's latest alias, which always returns the most recent version of the secret.

Integrations

In addition to the Secret Manager API and client libraries, you can also use the Cloud SDK to create secrets:

and to access secret versions:

Discovering secrets

As mentioned above, Secret Manager can store a variety of secrets. You can use Cloud DLP to help find secrets using infoType detectors for credentials and secrets. The following command will search all files in a source directory and produce a report of possible secrets to migrate to Secret Manager:

If you currently store secrets in a Cloud Storage bucket, you can configure a DLP job to scan your bucket in the Cloud Console. 

Over time, native Secret Manager integrations will become available in other Google Cloud products and services.

What about Berglas?

Berglas is an open source project for managing secrets on Google Cloud. You can continue to use Berglas as-is and, beginning with v0.5.0, you can use it to create and access secrets directly from Secret Manager using the sm:// prefix.

If you want to move your secrets from Berglas into Secret Manager, the berglas migrate command provides a one-time automated migration.

Accelerating security

Security is central to modern software development, and we’re excited to help you make your environment more secure by adding secrets management to our existing Google Cloud security product portfolio. With Secret Manager, you can easily manage, audit, and access secrets like API keys and credentials across Google Cloud. 

To learn more, check out the Secret Manager documentation and Secret Manager pricing pages.