HCP Vault Radar conducts ongoing reconnaissance of unsecured secrets stored as plain text in code repositories as well as configuration, DevOps, and collaboration tools.
Secret scanning is crucial for securing an enterprise’s security management lifecycle. Secret scanning helps identify and prevent security threats posed by exposed sensitive information, passwords, API keys, and other credentials.
GitHub’s Octoverse highlights several mediums where sensitive information may be exposed, including code, configuration tools, CI/CD platforms, and communication channels used to collaborate. When discovered bad actors, this type of information can be used to access systems and associated data, resulting in data breaches and other security incidents.
Secret scanning solutions proactively identify potential security threats so they can be remedied before they can be exploited. Scanning solutions search code repositories, commits, configuration tools, and other data sources for sensitive information, passwords and access keys.
Secret scanning is a key component of modern security strategies that helps organizations in several ways, including:
There are multiple programmatic strategies to secret scanning, including:
Secrets can hide in many places, so it’s important to scan for secrets in the most likely locations:
HCP Vault Radar, now in limited availability, is an extension to the HashiCorp Vault secrets management platform that conducts ongoing reconnaissance of unsecured secrets stored as plaintext in code repositories, configuration tools, DevOps tools, and collaboration tools.
HCP Vault Radar employs a hybrid scanning approach using both regular expressions and dictionaries to find leaked secrets and sensitive information. This broad set of evaluation techniques makes HCP Vault Radar an effective secrets scanning solution that can significantly reduce your organization’s attack surface and risk of data breach.
HCP Vault Radar focuses on several areas to ensure its effectiveness in secrets discovery.
Developer experience: HCP Vault Radar supports Git-based source control tools like GitHub, GitLab, and BitBucket. It can be automated to conduct scans over code repositories but also supports a developer’s native workflow by scanning commits and pull requests.
Coverage: HCP Vault Radar provides comprehensive coverage of relevant locations where secrets may be found. Supported locations include:
Wide coverage helps ensure vulnerabilities are identified across all areas of the software supply chain process, and broad integrations ensure that exposures can be remedied within common development workflows.
Accuracy: HCP Vault Radar leverages hybrid approach using a broad array of scanning approaches, including:
This hybrid secret scanning approach reduces both false positives and false negatives. False positives can lead to wasted time and effort on the exploration and remediation of non-existent issues, while false negatives can leave vulnerabilities undetected and expose the organization to risk.
Monitoring and alerting: HCP Vault Radar provides monitoring and alerting capabilities to enable quick detection and remediation. Real-time alerts and notifications can be configured to fire when vulnerabilities are identified, and can be integrated with existing incident-response workflows.
Prioritization: HCP Vault Radar is a risk-based code security platform that prioritizes evaluation results based on the presence of:
Customization: You can customize HCP Vault Radar’s scanning rules to meet the specific needs of your organization. This includes defining custom rules for identifying and prioritizing the sensitive data it discovers..
HCP Vault Radar is an exciting new addition to HashiCorp Vault’s secret lifecycle management capabilities that helps enterprises reduce risk associated with credential exposure. Discovery of unmanaged secrets and subsequent remediation workflows further differentiate Vault’s secrets lifecycle management offering by enabling organizations to take a proactive approach to remediation before a data breach occurs.
To learn more, check out these resources:
Learn how to deploy the underlying HashiCorp Nomad infrastructure and configuration to run HashiCorp Vault as a Nomad job.
Do cloud right with The Infrastructure Cloud from HashiCorp. Unlock developer potential while controlling cloud costs and risk.
Secrets sync is a new feature in HashiCorp Vault that facilitates centralized management, governance, and control of secrets for multiple external secret managers.