About Shadow complex secrets
This is the final post in a series about shadow IT. In this series, we’ve detailed how and why teams use unapproved apps and devices, and cybersecurity approaches for securely managing it. For a complete overview of the topics discussed in this series, download Managing the unmanageable: How shadow IT exists across every team – and how to wrangle it.We all use passwords and other secrets to access things at work. It’s the IT team’s responsibility to secure those secrets. For most departments, secrets management needs are simple: They sign in to apps and websites with passwords, or passkeys, or sometimes with multi-factor authentication.But developers have unique workflows and secrets management needs.The types of secrets developers manage every day include SSH keys, database and API keys, server credentials, and other encryption keys. These keys power authentication methods developers use every day to access systems, integrate applications, securely transfer files, and more. To complicate matters, developer secrets often live outside IT’s purview.That means developers are often left to manage secrets themselves, but that scenario can create serious risks for companies. A 2023 GitGuardian study revealed that in just one popular open-source repository used by developers, nearly 4,000 unique secrets were exposed across all projects. Of those unique secrets, they found 768 were still in active use. Separately, in the first two months of 2024, GitHub reported it found more than one million leaked secrets on public repositories, which translates to a rate of about 12 secrets leaked per minute during that time. That’s a lot of leaks!Secrets management, in other words, is a growing problem. To make matters worse, the typical shadow IT concerns that plague non-developer teams apply to developers, too. That is, the passwords and credentials they use to sign in to apps and websites may not be secure – and IT may not even know about it.The challenge, should IT and security teams choose to accept it: Secure encryption keys and other developer secrets no matter which apps and tools are being used – and do it without adding friction to already complex workflows.Breaking down developers’ unique secrets
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End up with hard-coded credentials.In addition to taking shortcuts, lack of education around proper secrets management has allowed insecure habits to form, including:Reusing secrets across projects.Using the same secrets in both production and testing/staging.Storing secrets in shared or unsecured spreadsheets.Sending secrets over email, chat, and text.Former employees maintaining access to secrets.When developers share secrets using unencrypted email messaging apps, manually set up system configurations on their local device to run a program, or manually copy sensitive values to connect to another machine, those secrets are not secure.Securing shadow IT with secrets management solutions for developersAs we detailed in the last post in this series, a first step to wrangling shadow IT across all of your company’s departments is understanding employees’ responsibilities and workflows. This helps IT and security teams identify not only where employees may be using shadow IT to help them in their jobs, but why they’re using it.Employees often use shadow IT to improve their productivity – to work around something that’s holding them back from doing their best work, on schedule. This is especially important to understand for the engineering team.The question is how to secure developer workflows while simultaneously streamlining them. Secure credential management for developers can be trickier than it is among non-developers, because the workflows are more technical, so the fix requires a more bespoke solution. Implementing single sign-on (SSO) as part of an identity and access management (IAM) framework can go a long way to securing non-development workflows, but they don’t typically address developer needs.The good news is there is arguably more opportunity within developer workflows to secure credentials and reduce friction than with other teams. It’s not particularly convenient for developers to generate SSH keys manually every time, or to store SSH keys on their local drive, or to store plaintext secrets in code. These (insecure) methods are just the way things have always been done – but they’re certainly not without friction.However, it can be difficult for IT and security admins to know where to start, because they’re less familiar with developer workflows. That being the case, a good first step
