Torus – A secure, shared workspace for secrets
1–10 of 27 posts
Re: Torus – A secure, shared workspace for secrets
#2Looks interesting. I probably need to get my hands dirty to understand how it's different from Hashicorp's Vault. A quick glance says it's a cloud-based solution with simpler UX. I see only client binaries and sign-up instructions. There are no server setup instructions.
Re: Torus – A secure, shared workspace for secrets
#3This does not seem any less complicated than Vault or Keywhiz.
Re: Torus – A secure, shared workspace for secrets
#4As soon as developers have access to the production credentials it's game over. Auditability is gone. Passwords end-up being stored in various password stores and plain files because it's convenient. Developers connect to the production system and start doing live changes.
Hashicorp Vault is more difficult to put in place but it does the right thing. With it's custom backend it can generate temporary tokens, for example to access the database. Those token are short-lived and part of the audit log.
Re: Torus – A secure, shared workspace for secrets
#5As soon as developers have access to the production credentials it's game over. Auditability is gone. Passwords end-up being stored in various password stores and plain files because it's convenient. Developers connect to the production system and start doing live changes. Hashicorp Vault is more difficult to put in place but it does the right thing. With it's custom backend it can generate temporary tokens, for exam…
Hashi Vault isn't that difficult to setup, especially for smaller setups, it's basically just a binary you run, with the file backend. You still get the auditing goodness, etc. Otherwise I agree with what else you said.
Re: Torus – A secure, shared workspace for secrets
#6Looks interesting. I probably need to get my hands dirty to understand how it's different from Hashicorp's Vault. A quick glance says it's a cloud-based solution with simpler UX. I see only client binaries and sign-up instructions. There are no server setup instructions.
https://github.com/manifoldco/torus-cli/ appears to be the client side source
Re: Torus – A secure, shared workspace for secrets
#7As soon as developers have access to the production credentials it's game over. Auditability is gone. Passwords end-up being stored in various password stores and plain files because it's convenient. Developers connect to the production system and start doing live changes. Hashicorp Vault is more difficult to put in place but it does the right thing. With it's custom backend it can generate temporary tokens, for exam…
https://www.torus.sh/docs/latest/commands/access-control
They seem to have pretty serious access control (Orgs, Teams) and a Policy based access control system.
Re: Torus – A secure, shared workspace for secrets
#8Looks interesting. I probably need to get my hands dirty to understand how it's different from Hashicorp's Vault. A quick glance says it's a cloud-based solution with simpler UX. I see only client binaries and sign-up instructions. There are no server setup instructions.
At Manifold(1), we built Torus from the ground-up to solve a consistent pain when building cloud apps: securely storing, sharing, and rotating secrets used to build, run, and deploy code. Our goal is to make it simple for anyone, not just the security savvy, to keep their secrets out of git and off disk.
To do this, we designed our security model (host and cryptography architecture) for hosting in the cloud to ensure we never have access to any of the keys used to encrypt or sign secrets — they’re derived from a user’s password and never forwarded along. We’ve posted more information in our documentation(2).
The server is currently closed source, with plans to open source it. The client (where all cryptographic operations happen) is open source.
1) https://www.manifold.co/ 2) https://www.torus.sh/docs/latest/internals/crypto
Re: Torus – A secure, shared workspace for secrets
#9As soon as developers have access to the production credentials it's game over. Auditability is gone. Passwords end-up being stored in various password stores and plain files because it's convenient. Developers connect to the production system and start doing live changes. Hashicorp Vault is more difficult to put in place but it does the right thing. With it's custom backend it can generate temporary tokens, for exam…
With Torus, you can use our fine grained access controls to model exactly how your organization divvies up access and responsibilities. You can give a team (users or machines) access to everything, a specific environment, or even a specific service instance within an environment.
Only users or machines with explicit access can retrieve the encrypted secrets from our servers and they are never written to disk in plain-text.
With our worklog(1) feature, we make it really easy to rotate secrets when a team member leaves, commits them to git by accident, or a machine is compromised by listing out every secret they could access cryptographically.
For small teams and deployments, we want to make it easy for them to keep their secrets out of git without having to securely manage and deploy heavier tooling such as Vault or Keywhiz.
1) https://www.torus.sh/docs/latest/commands/organizations#work...
Re: Torus – A secure, shared workspace for secrets
#10As soon as developers have access to the production credentials it's game over. Auditability is gone. Passwords end-up being stored in various password stores and plain files because it's convenient. Developers connect to the production system and start doing live changes. Hashicorp Vault is more difficult to put in place but it does the right thing. With it's custom backend it can generate temporary tokens, for exam…
The idea is not new. Back in the 1980s I worked at a job where access to live production systems was tightly controlled and audited. Developers could get access, but passwords were short-lived and everything was logged.