Starting today, this will be known as "Shanghai'd credentials" and be reason #1 why we use ephemeral credentials (e.g. AWS STS/SSO) rather than static credentials (e.g. IAM Users)
One of the major benefits of ephemeral tokens is that they become less attractive to put into the code, and more attractive to put in a config file/vault that's easier to update and keep secret. This in itself is useful because it makes it less likely that it will be in some source file someone shows, or pushed to some remote repo that at some point has permissions allowed so people can see it.
We got rid of all IAM users used by applications and moved to role-based access. Nowhere in the application do you need to enter AWS credentials. AWS SDK will attempt to discover short-lived credentials for you and will assume the role specified at the infrastructure layer, e.g. in a task definition.
same here, but we still have IAM Users for service accounts. E.g. some customers have on premise infra that needs to talk to our services of infrastructure.
Do you know a way where RBAC can be used for the above?
For us, we're using long lived credentials in this space using IAM Users but with very tightly controlled authorisations.
You add the long lived IAM user API key/secret to it and it stores it in a password protected storage (MacOS keychain or similar).
Then you invoke aws-vault with an IAM role and command, and it will handle obtaining short-lived credentials scoped to that role (including TOTP 2-factor code auth), and then run the command with those temporary credentials as env vars.
With the right AWS permissions on your user, it can also automatically rotate the IAM user API keys for you.
I like your approach. So far I used profiles extensively. AWS_PROFILE is your friend. No idea why AWS doesn't heavily promote this everywhere they can.
It can either use a secret injected into an env var to bootstrap rotating ephemeral/refresh tokens or use a role provided by the environment (which can also provide short lived tokens), depending on your runtime environment and use case (on prem, cloud, k8s, etc).
Static, long lived secrets with limited governance that have no conditional access guards are weapons of mass self destruction.
Keeping secrets in environmental variables has always seemed dodgy to me. Unless specifically cleared, they get inherited by all child processes. Maybe there are never any child processes in your application, or that could be desired behavior in some circumstances, but generally it seems like asking for trouble.
There's also the reverse issue - if they change after your process is started.
Refreshing an environment variable that has changed is (for me) a line I won't cross. Time to write the app a different way, once that becomes a concern.
Yes, but credentials should either be long lived with (very) limited scope _or_ short lived with required scope.
For example, for AWS you can create long lived credentials for users which are scoped to only allow one operation, namely obtaining a short lived token (with the aid of a hardware token such as a Yubikey) with scope to perform other operations.
You may also setup federated (trusted) relationships. For example, a GitHub Workflow can be trusted to assume an IAM role. In that scenario, there's no long lived secret in scope.
The oidc subject includes the GitHub org, repo, branch, and environment for the IAM assume role policy to match or filter.
This is not at all the takeaway from this. It's "this shitty developer should not have had access to this data in the first place". With a nuance of "this database probably shouldn't exist in this form in one place to begin with".
How you come up with a name is up to you and how you use it. Personally I would go with "July 2022 Shanghai National Police database leak" because I'm not having any conversation where a cute codename would be less confusing.
At work we codename security issues we are working on for Slack channels, etc. We use unrelated names that you could get from a name generator.
I don't believe this comment is made in good faith, there is nothing wrong with the "right" and it's senselessly adding fuel to our political division.
There is something deeply wrong with the authoritarian politics of the right and its casual use of racism to further political control.
> it's senselessly adding fuel to our political division.
This comment, whether you realize it or not, is coming from a place of extreme social privilege.
Remember that for the majority of people, politics is not a game. It is serious. People lose their rights to live the life they want all the time. Sometimes those politics turn violent and people lose everything.
