How Bitwarden Secrets Manager offers built-in flexibility for developers

All modern development teams are impacted by the same global secrets management trends, but their requirements are not ‘one-size-fits-all.’ Many teams also have specialized secrets management needs depending on their industry, location, development pipeline, security infrastructure, and more.

Bitwarden Secrets Manager empowers development teams of all sizes to securely store, share, and automate their infrastructure and application secrets, protecting their business from the rising threat of data breaches. Supporting custom operations via software development kits (SDKs), an out-of-the-box command line interface (CLI), package management wrappers, integrations, and an open source code base, Bitwarden Secrets Manager is a flexible solution trusted by businesses everywhere.

This article will explore how developer teams can leverage flexible functionality and options offered by Bitwarden Secrets Manager to address their specific secrets management needs and development environment. 

Secrets management is the practice of securely managing the infrastructure and machine credentials needed for developer pipelines, including SSH keys, TLS certificates, private encryption keys, database passwords, and API keys. It involves implementing strict access controls, encryption, and auditing to protect these secrets from unauthorized access. By ensuring that only authorized personnel can access these secrets, organizations can significantly reduce the risk of security incidents and maintain the integrity of their sensitive data.

Managing secrets can be complex, especially in large-scale IT ecosystems. One of the primary challenges is secret sprawl, where secrets proliferate across multiple systems, making it difficult to track and manage them effectively. Without a centralized secrets management solution, organizations often face decentralized and inconsistent management practices, increasing the risk of data breaches. Manual sharing of secrets further exacerbates these risks, as malicious actors can exploit outdated or exposed secrets. Hardcoded credentials in applications and scripts are another common issue, making systems vulnerable to attacks. Additionally, a lack of awareness and visibility into secrets usage and management can hinder the detection and response to security incidents, leaving sensitive data exposed.

Organizations should consider adopting a secrets management solution with the following attributes to overcome the challenges of managing secrets to meet best practice standards.

• Centralized: Use a centralized secrets management solution to store, manage, and retrieve secrets in one location, reducing the likelihood of secrets sprawl. 

• End-to-end encryption: Choose a solution with end-to-end encryption, which ensures safe storage and retrieval of sensitive developer secrets, preventing the risk of data breaches.

• Auditable: Ensure your secrets manager solution allows your organization to audit for suspicious activity or unauthorized access.

• Scalable: The best secrets management offerings easily scale as your business grows, meeting business needs at every stage.

• Flexible: Give your developers, DevOps, and IT teams a flexible secret management solution that seamlessly integrates with their existing tech stack.

Bitwarden Secrets Manager meets these best practice standards for secure secrets management, ensuring development teams can easily and securely manage their infrastructure and machine secrets while reducing the risk of data breaches.

Let’s dive into how Bitwarden Secrets Manager meets developer needs with flexible secrets management functionality.

The Bitwarden Secrets Manager CLI is the primary method by which users securely inject their secrets into applications and infrastructure, fostering machine-to-machine communication. In addition to the out-of-box CLI, users can leverage additional CLI wrappers for various package managers like Docker, Brew, and Scoop, which are coming soon.

Bitwarden customer AccuRanker saw the benefits of the CLI firsthand after building their own custom CLI wrapper to integrate with the AccuRanker backend system. Says backend engineer Phillip Kampmann, “We’re now able to access secrets such as encryption keys through our own internal API.”

Bitwarden Secrets Manager offers many integrations to easily build connections between your various machines, CI/CD pipelines, automation tools, and cloud providers, saving your team time and enhancing productivity. GitHub actions, Ansible, and Kubernetes integrations are now available to secure your development pipelines. Keep an eye out for the upcoming Terraform integration, coming to Bitwarden Secrets Manager soon.

If a development team decides they would like to build their own integrations and operations for Bitwarden Secrets Manager, software development kits (SDKs) are a great place to start. SDKs provide all the language-specific development tools they need in one installable package, so nothing needs to be built from scratch. SDK languages available include C++, C#, Go, Java, JS, PHP, Python, Ruby, and Rust, with more languages being added all the time.

Bitwarden customer Titanom Technologies utilized the Bitwarden Secrets Manager SDK for Rust to develop their own custom CLI.

“It reads a project configuration file, requests all the secrets from Secrets Manager, and then injects them into a process. This way, you don’t have to specify them manually in a configuration file,” says Head of IT, Jannis Morgenstern.

This custom solution directly impacts the bottom line, driving decreased workload for leadership and increased developer productivity. “I can tell you that my workload has decreased, probably by one to three hours per week. Productivity has also increased because of the tool I developed,” says Morgenstern.

The Bitwarden Secrets Manager source code is hosted on GitHub for everyone to review, audit, and contribute to, opening the gate for community-shared enhancements. If your team wants a particular feature or functionality in the product and has the expertise to build it, there is nothing stopping you from submitting it as a code contribution. After extensive code review, it may be available for all users to benefit from! If your team doesn’t have the expertise, you can submit a feature request via the community forums. Different applications, cloud providers, or organizational units can operate with their own security model, which can complicate policy enforcement and contribute to 'secret sprawl.'

Now is the time to start securing your development and infrastructure secrets with the trusted secrets management solutions by Bitwarden. Sign up for a free 7-day teams or enterprise trial of Bitwarden Secrets Manager, or set up a free account.