We’re excited to announce Secrets Store - Cloudflare’s new secrets management offering!

A secrets store does exactly what the name implies - it stores secrets. Secrets are variables that are used by developers that contain sensitive information - information that only authorized users and systems should have access to.

If you’re building an application, there are various types of secrets that you need to manage. Every system should be designed to have identity & authentication data that verifies some form of identity in order to grant access to a system or application. One example of this is API tokens for making read and write requests to a database. Failure to store these tokens securely could lead to unauthorized access of information - intentional or accidental.

The stakes with secret’s management are high. Every gap in the storage of these values has potential to lead to a data leak or compromise. A security administrator’s worst nightmare.

Developers are primarily focused on creating applications, they want to build quickly, they want their system to be performant, and they want it to scale. For them, secrets management is about ease of use, performance, and reliability. On the other hand, security administrators are tasked with ensuring that these secrets remain secure. It’s their responsibility to safeguard sensitive information, ensure that security best practices are met, and to manage any fallout of an incident such as a data leak or breach. It’s their job to verify that developers at their company are building in a secure and foolproof manner.

In order for developers to build at high velocity and for security administrators to feel at ease, companies need to adopt a highly reliable and secure secrets manager. This should be a system that ensures that sensitive information is stored with the highest security measures, while maintaining ease of use that will allow engineering teams to efficiently build.

Why Cloudflare is building a secrets store

Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet - that means a more secure Internet. We recognize our customers’ need for a secure, centralized repository for storing sensitive data. Within the Cloudflare ecosystem, are various places where customers need to store and access API and authorization tokens, shared secrets, and sensitive information. It’s our job to make it easy for customers to manage these values securely.

The need for secrets management goes beyond Cloudflare. Customers have sensitive data that they manage everywhere - at their cloud provider, on their own infrastructure, across machines. Our plan is to make our Secrets Store a one-stop shop for all of our customer’s secrets.

The evolution of secrets at Cloudflare

In 2020, we launched environment variables and secrets for Cloudflare Workers, allowing customers to create and encrypt variables across their Worker scripts. By doing this, developers can obfuscate the value of a variable so that it’s no longer available in plaintext and can only be accessed by the Worker.

Adoption and use of these secrets is quickly growing. We now have more than three million Workers scripts that reference variables and secrets managed through Cloudflare. One piece of feedback that we continue to hear from customers is that these secrets are scoped too narrowly.

Today, customers can only use a variable or secret within the Worker that it’s associated with. Instead, customers have secrets that they share across Workers. They don’t want to re-create those secrets and focus their time on keeping them in sync. They want account level secrets that are managed in one place but are referenced across multiple Workers scripts and functions.

Outside of Workers, there are many use cases for secrets across Cloudflare services.

Inside our Web Application Firewall (WAF), customers can make rules that look for authorization headers in order to grant or deny access to requests. Today, when customers create these rules, they put the authorization header value in plaintext, so that anyone with WAF access in the Cloudflare account can see its value. What we’ve heard from our customers is that even internally, engineers should not have access to this type of information. Instead, what our customers want is one place to manage the value of this header or token, so that only authorized users can see, create, and rotate this value. Then when creating a WAF rule, engineers can just reference the associated secret e.g.“account.mysecretauth”. By doing this, we help our customers secure their system by reducing the access scope and enhance management of this value by keeping it updated in one place.

With new Cloudflare products and features quickly developing, we’re hearing more and more use cases for a centralized secrets manager. One that can be used to store Access Service tokens or shared secrets for Webhooks.

With the new account level Secrets Store, we’re excited to give customers the tools they need to manage secrets across Cloudflare services.

Securing the Secret Store

To have a secrets store, there are a number of measures that need to be in place, and we’re committing to providing these for our customers.

First, we’re going to give the tools that our customers need to restrict access to secrets. We will have scope permissions that will allow admins to choose which users can view, create, edit, or remove secrets. We also plan to add the same level of granularity to our services - giving customers the ability to say “only allow this Worker to access this secret and only allow this set of Firewall rules to access that secret”.

Next, we’re going to give our customers extensive audits that will allow them to track the access and use of their secrets. Audit logs are crucial for security administrators. They can be used to alert team members that a secret was used by an unauthorized service or that a compromised secret is being accessed when it shouldn’t be. We will give customers audit logs for every secret-related event, so that customers can see exactly who is making changes to secrets and which services are accessing and when.

In addition to the built-in security of the Secrets Store, we’re going to give customers the tools to rotate their encryption keys on-demand or at a cadence that fits the right security posture for them.

Sign up for the beta

We’re excited to get the Secrets Store in our customer’s hands. If you’re interested in using this, please fill out this form, and we’ll reach out to you when it’s ready to use.

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