11–20 of 27 posts
I personally found the experience of using Torus to be great. Getting a quick working setup is easy and it doesn't take much effort to transition from there to locked down access control. Will likely continue using it outside of the Docker context.
Reading the docs, though, it does seem like it's one legendary AWS outage away from being a huge problem:
>Torus’s infrastructure has been designed from the ground up for resilience without any single point of failure. All of our services are autoscaled and run in multiple availability zones in the us-east-1 region.
Looks 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Could you highlight differences compared to Vault?
This enables Torus to establish a web of trust (much like gpg), allowing clients to retrieve and validate (by navigating down the web of trust) public signing and encryption keys for other users or machines. Using these validated keys, clients can encrypt secrets for each other without ever sending the secret (or any material used to encrypt it) to the server.
Vault, on the other hand, operates under a centralized encryption model with all secrets encrypted using keys encrypted by the root master key. For a vault cluster to boot up, the vault must be unsealed which complicates it’s high availability story — for a cluster to cold start it must have access to the master key.
The onus is on operators to properly store, transmit, and leverage the master key to unseal the vault which requires a certain level of sophistication to do properly. If the root key were to be lost or compromised, then all of the secrets would be as well.
Torus uses a decentralized model and builds on-top of the privilege of least privilege — users and machines only have access to the secrets they require. Making it far easier to operate as a cloud service (no cold start problem) and ensure that we never have access to your secrets.
We don’t see Torus as only a security tool, instead, we see it as a productivity tool by focusing on making it super easy to set, audit, and rotate secrets when a machine is compromised, developer leaves, or key is committed to git.
Looks interesting. I'll definitely take a look at how this compares to Hashicorp Vault. Definitely getting closer and closer to the point where I can start to properly utilize a tool like this. Reading the docs, though, it does seem like it's one legendary AWS outage away from being a huge problem: >Torus’s infrastructure has been designed from the ground up for resilience without any single point of failure. All of…
Very strange navigation behaviour: enabled JS, and then clicking e.g. 'Docs' modifies the URL in address bar, but requires a manual refresh to actually load the docs page...