I am using Google Cloud Secrets in a NodeJS Project. I am moving away from using preset environment variables and trying to find out the best practice to store and reuse secrets.
The 3 main routes I've found to use secrets are:
Fetching all secrets on startup and set them as ENV variables for later use
Fetching all secrets on startup and set as constant variables
Each time a secret is required, fetch it from Cloud Secrets
Google's own best practice documentation mentions 2 conflicting things:
Use ENV variables to set secrets at startup (source)
Don't use ENV variables as they can be accessed in debug endpoints and traversal attacks among other things (source)
My questions are:
Should I store secrets as variables to be re-used or should I fetch them each time?
Does this have an impact on quotas?
The best practice is to load one time the secret (at startup, or the first time is it accessed) to optimize performances and prevent API call latency. And yes, the access secret quotas is impacted on each access.
If a debugger tool is connected to the environment, Variables and Env Var data can be compromised. The threat is roughly the same. Be sure to secure correctly the environment.
Related
We are currently using GCS for our secrets but want to move to Google Secret Manager. We include gsutil copies in our build steps, but I like the idea of avoiding that step in local development and instead get the secrets from secret manager at invocation.
I'm concerned about cold start time increases. Does anyone do it this way, and if so how impactful is it to cold start times?
I'm trying to build a node.js server with express framework, and I want to store a private key for admin APIs in my server.I'm now using .env file to store those values, and in my routes, using that values by calling like process.env.ADMIN_KEY.
Question
Is it secure way to handle private datas? or there's another way better than this?
It is more secure to store your secrets in a .env file than in the source code itself. But you can do one better. Here are the ways I've seen secrets managed, from least to most secure:
Hard-code the secrets in the code.
Pros: None. Don't do this.
Cons: Your developers will see your production secrets as part of their regular work. Your secrets will be checked into source control. Both are security risks. Also, you have to modify the code to use it in different environments, like dev, test, and production.
Put secrets in environment variables, loaded from a .env file.
Pros: Developers won't see your production secrets. You can use different secrets in dev, test, and production, without having to modify the code.
Cons: Malicious code can read your secrets. The bulk of your application's code is probably open-source libraries. Bad code may creep in without you knowing it.
Put secrets in a dedicated secret manager, like Vault by HashiCorp or Secret Manager by Google Cloud.
Pros: It's harder for malicious code to read your secrets. You get auditing of who accessed secrets when. You can assign fine-grained roles for who updates secrets and who can read them. You can update and version your secrets.
Cons: It's additional technology that you have to learn. It may be an additional piece of software that you need to set up and manage, unless it's included in the cloud platform you're using.
So the choice is really between items 2 and 3 above. Which one you pick will depend on how sensitive your secrets are and how much extra work it would be to use a dedicated secret manager. For example, if your project is running on Google Cloud Platform, the Secret Manager is just one API call away. It may be just as easy on the other major cloud platforms, but I don't have first-hand experience with them.
Simple answer is YES, .env is used to store keys and secrets. It is not pushed to your repo i.e. github or bitbucket or anywhere you store your code. In that way it is not exposed.
Here are the tutorial links for correct usage:
managing-environment-variables-in-node-js-with-dotenv
how-secure-is-your-environment-file-in-node-js
Secrets stored in environment variables are in risk of getting exposed (for non-private node apps) as for example libraries you use might print the environment into the log in case of an error. So it would be more safe to store them in a file outside of source control and import it where needed.
https://movingfast.io/articles/environment-variables-considered-harmful/
It is yes. An additional security check can be added by using encrypted values. Also avoid to checkin your .env file in public repo.
You can and should store secrets, credentials or private data securely inside a .env is a secure environment config section in your projects, useful for storing API keys and app credentials. Only invited collaborators are able to see the contents of your .env file.
I have around 20+ environment variables, some of them are very sensitive information, like db connections, passwords, secrets, aws keys, etc...
and that can't be anywhere in the source code.
I'm using dotenv in development, but what about production? do I have to set each variable before running node? is there any better way to do that?
Update
I'm using azure VM at the moment, but I'm moving towards aws
Regarding AWS It depends on your deployment.
Both beanstalk and lambda support environmental variables.
In case of an EC2 deployment you can add some sensitive information encrypted with user data, or specify a mechanism to setup the environmental variables from a safe place.
For example you can create and ec2 machine with a role which has access to s3 where your environmental variables reside.
Your user data script might utilize this role and setup the environmental variables from s3.
When it comes to encryption you can also check Key Management Service.
I am using environment variables to store API secrets and data encryption keys. I wonder is environment variables are the most secure way to store such data ? If hacker get into my server, can he access environment vars ?
It depends on the platform, and it is probably somewhat opinionated, but in general I think environment variables are a good way to store secrets in many scenarios.
If for example your application is vulnerable to SQL injection, local file inclusion or some other application level vulnerability, any secret stored in a database or in a file could be easily compromised. The same attack is probably not possible if environment variables are used, local file inclusion for example can't be used to retrieve environment variables.
Also using environment variables helps with version control issues, it helps to avoid checking secrets into your VCS. It may allow you to manage secrets better across environments, only allowing relevant people to be able to learn those secrets in production.
However, in case of a full compromise of your server, the attacker can also inspect environment variables of course. But if your server is compromised to that level, you lost anyway.
Examples of better ways to store secrets could be probably listed, but they are specific to the environment and technology stack you are using. For example in Azure, Key Vault could sometimes be better, in Amazon a similar facility is the Key Management Service (KMS), etc.
I have linked together a couple of Docker containers that use each others API endpoints. These API endpoints are protected by a secret and are generated on container startup. I'm looking for a safe way to share these secrets between those services without doing anything static (e.g. hardcoding). These services are created and linked together using docker-compose and it is possible for the secret to be overridden using an environment variable. This behavior is not encouraged for production however.
What is in my case the safest way to distribute these secrets?
Things I have considered:
Using a central data container which stores these secrets as a file. The clients can then link to this container and lookup the secret in the file.
This huge downside this approach has is that it limits the containers to run on the same node.
Generating a docker-compose file with these random secrets hardcoded into them before deploying the containers.
The downside to this approach would be that it wouldn't be possible to simply use the docker-compose file but limiting yourself to a bash script to generate something as mission critical as these secrets. This would also not adhere to my sidenote that the solution should be dynamically adaptable to secret changes.
Sidenote
Ultimately, I would prefer it if the solution could also adapt dynamically to secret changes. For example, when a container fails, it will restart automatically, thus also generating a new secret.