This article is the third part of a series on best practices for securely managing AWS credentials on CI/CD. In this article, we cover the last leg of the continuous delivery process to update your AWS resources and how to store sensitive data using Pulumi securely.
The secrets in your infrastructure are a vital part of your security model, and provisioning infrastructure is an inherently privileged process. Previously we introduced secret encryption and started encrypting secret configuration values inside the Pulumi state so that users could be confident their passwords, tokens, and other secret values were viewable only by them while managing their infrastructure. Our first iteration of the encryption used either a passphrase for encrypting the secret or encryption via the Pulumi service backend. However, these options didn’t meet the needs of our users who needed more control over their data. That’s why we also added support for “Cloud Secret Providers,” giving users full confidence that their sensitive values are for their eyes only.
This article is the second part of a series on best practices for securely managing AWS credentials on CI/CD. In this article, we go in-depth on providing AWS credentials securely to a 3rd party and introduce a Pulumi program to automate rotating access keys.
Yesterday AWS announced an exciting new feature — the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer — a service powered by automated reasoning that detects potentially-insecure access to your AWS resources, including S3 Buckets, SQS Queues, Lambdas, and more. At the same time, Pulumi announced a new policy as code solution, CrossGuard, that validates policies at deployment time. The question is: Can IAM Access Analyzer and Pulumi CrossGuard be combined to get the best of both solutions?
We are very excited to announce that we have partnered with GitHub to offer our users better protection for their Pulumi Access Tokens.
By default, Pulumi users manage the state of their cloud infrastructure deployments using https://app.pulumi.com. This service provides state storage, concurrency control, audit history and access controls for both individuals and teams working with Pulumi. Each user and service account can generate one or more Pulumi Access Tokens to be used to authenticate with this service. These access tokens can be used on both local development machines, as well as in CI/CD systems for automated infrastructure deployments. These access tokens are sensitive secrets which should never be shared publicly, and in particular should never be committed to source control.
Every non-trivial application relies on configuration values that may depend on the current execution environment. Some of these values contain sensitive information that shouldn’t be shared publicly. In general, the fewer parties that have access to those secret values, the safer the application will be—in fact, in an ideal world, no one would be granted direct access to those secrets.
We’ve had a 1st class concept of encrypted secrets configuration ever since first releasing Pulumi. Customers have told us they love having such a simple and easy way to ensure safe management of tokens, database passwords, and more. Since launching, however, we’ve also heard that you’d like more control over encryption and to see this protection expanded to cover not just configuration, but all of the secret data within their Pulumi deployments.
To support this, we’ve added two new features to Pulumi in our latest 0.17.12 release:
Together, these features provide you with complete control over how secrets are managed within Pulumi deployments. We have worked with customers with advanced security and compliance needs while developing this feature, enabling them to use our online hosted SaaS with even greater confidence.