Solving Secrets Management Challenges for NHIs: GitGuardian Integration with HashiCorp Vault

In a world where Non-Human Identities (NHIs) outnumber human users by 45 to 1, managing their associated secrets has become a critical challenge for enterprises. Each NHI establishes point-to-point communications and authenticates through secrets. This creates a large volume of secrets, which often aren't managed consistently, posing significant security risks.

This problem is compounded by vault sprawl—the use of multiple vaults and secrets managers across teams—making it difficult to enforce consistent security practices. According to Voice of Practitioners (VoP) respondents, organizations typically use an average of six different secrets management tools, adding to this complexity.

Vaults are essential for securing NHIs. They help organizations ensure compliance, enforce access control, and automate secret rotation. Among them, HashiCorp Vault has emerged as a popular choice for enterprises seeking scalable secrets management.

To tackle these challenges, GitGuardian is thrilled to announce its new integration with HashiCorp Vault. This integration gives organizations greater visibility into their secrets, enabling them to prioritize and remediate incidents more effectively—ultimately strengthening security across even the most complex environments.

Uncovering the hidden risks in secrets management

The role of vaults in securing NHIs

Unlike human identities, which are tied to specific managers or departments, NHIs can exist independently, making it challenging to track ownership and lifecycle. They can be created by anyone in the organization, often without adhering to company-defined policies. This misunderstanding often stems from a lack of training or the perception that security measures impede productivity.

Consequently, organizations lack a centralized source of truth for NHI. By using a vault, organizations can centralize the storage of secrets, reducing the likelihood of unauthorized access and facilitating efficient rotation. This trend is evident across industries— 77% of VoP respondents declared their organization is either investing in or planning to invest in secrets management solutions by 2025. Adoption at scale is primarily driven by the need to enhance security and control over secrets.

However, while vaults address the secure storage of secrets, they only solve some of the challenges around secrets management. Most vaults lack visibility into:

1. Where is each secret used, and what is the tied identity
2. The permissions each secret grants across systems.
3. Secrets stored outside the vault, such as those hardcoded in applications or mistakenly pushed to public repositories.

GitGuardian's integration with HashiCorp (HCP) Vault bridges these gaps by providing deep visibility into secrets usage and permissions, detecting exposed secrets across environments, and enabling faster remediation when issues arise.

The challenge of siloed vaults

Many organizations rely on multiple vault solutions—legacy systems, third-party vaults, and modern cloud-native vaults—that are often not managed by one single team. These siloed vaults create isolated pockets of secrets, making it difficult to track:

• Active vs. outdated secrets: Secrets still accessible but no longer in use create unnecessary attack surfaces.
• Duplicated secrets: Multiple instances of the same secret can be scattered across different vaults, complicating secret rotation and increasing exposure.

GitGuardian's integration with multiple vaults—now including HCP Vault and CyberArk Conjur—helps organizations consolidate secrets from disparate sources. Providing a single pane of glass reduces the risk of forgotten or outdated secrets slipping through the cracks.

Overcoming common pitfalls in vault management

Even when using multiple vaults, organizations often lack consistent practices for auditing, rotating, and monitoring secrets, resulting in vulnerabilities:

• Lack of Audit: Vault access logs are crucial for identifying unusual access patterns and potential vulnerabilities, as highlighted by CVE-2024-0831. But many organizations fail to audit these logs consistently, often due to the absence of automated tools or the overwhelming volume of log data.
• Inconsistent Rotation: While one team may rotate secrets regularly, another team using a different vault might not. This can slow incident response when immediate rotation is needed to contain an active threat. 

GitGuardian's integration with HCP Vault offers robust use cases designed to address these vulnerabilities.

Let's dive into how this integration can transform your organization's approach to secrets management.

Applications of GitGuardian's HCP Vault integration

GitGuardian's integration with HCP Vault provides robust solutions for several key use cases:

Detecting and vaulting secrets exposed in the organization's internal perimeter

Continuous monitoring is critical for detecting secrets that may be compromised within codebases and collaboration tools. GitGuardian's integration with HCP Vault can:

• Alert security teams in real-time when a secret is at risk.
• Trigger the vaulting of exposed secrets and initiate rotation workflows to mitigate risks.

Detecting leaks on public GitHub

Since 2017, GitGuardian has monitored GitHub, the world's largest developer platform, and uncovered tens of millions of publicly exposed secrets. Through the integration, security teams can periodically check their vaulted secrets against the largest database of public leaks to prevent the reuse of compromised secrets.

Together, these proactive measures strengthen organizations' security posture by reducing the risks exposed secrets pose.

Expanding beyond detection

GitGuardian's integration with HCP Vault doesn't stop at detection. It also supports advanced secrets management practices to address the inherent blind spots of traditional vaults.

1. Enumerating vaulted secrets: provides a centralized view of all secrets stored within HashiCorp Vault, thereby reducing blind spots and improving visibility.
2. Identifying security risks: flags weak, outdated, or unused secrets, enabling security teams to focus on high-risk issues that require immediate remediation.
3. Incident prioritization: links vaulted secrets to secret incidents, allowing the swift identification of compromised secrets in HCP Vault.
4. Practical remediation guidance: offers actionable steps for rotating and managing vaulted secrets, streamlining the remediation process.

By combining detection with proactive management, GitGuardian's integration with HCP Vault significantly enhances an organization's ability to protect its NHI and associated secrets.

Accommodating the complexity of real organizations

GitGuardian's integration with HCP Vault is built to scale in complex, multi-vault environments. Our Product and Engineering teams continuously enhance these capabilities to meet the unique challenges of managing secrets in large, distributed organizations.

End-to-end mapping for safe secrets rotation

Understanding the lifecycle of each secret is essential for effective secrets management. GitGuardian's integration will enable end-to-end mapping, allowing organizations to track:

• Where each secret is used and which entities consume it.
• The permissions granted by each secret, ensuring that they are not over-provisioned.

This comprehensive view will facilitate a secure rotation of compromised secrets without disrupting dependent systems, reducing downtime and maintaining security integrity.

Secrets lifecycle management

Manual secrets management is time-consuming and prone to errors. GitGuardian's integration with HCP Vault will contribute to critical secrets management tasks, including:

• Access control: reviewing who has access to secrets and highlighting any issues.
• Auditing and compliance: tracking access patterns and rotation history to help organizations maintain compliance with industry standards.

By reducing human involvement, GitGuardian's integration minimizes errors and ensures consistency across the entire vault ecosystem.

Cross-vault policies for consistent security

Organizations managing multiple vaults need a consistent security policy across all vaults to ensure solid security and compliance. GitGuardian's integration facilitates cross-vault policies, guaranteeing that every vault adheres to the same security standards, even in highly distributed environments.

Securing your infrastructure with GitGuardian's HCP Vault integration

In today's complex security landscape, managing secrets across fragmented, ever-expanding environments has become daunting. Vault sprawl, unmonitored secrets, and inconsistent rotation practices create vulnerabilities that attackers can easily exploit.

GitGuardian's integration with HCP Vault centralizes secrets management, empowering organizations to regain control, reduce security blind spots, and streamline the lifecycle of NHIs across their infrastructure.

As secrets management evolves, GitGuardian is committed to expanding its support for additional vault providers—starting with Azure Key Vault and Google Cloud Secrets Manager—and broadening use cases to help organizations navigate an increasingly complex security landscape.

Ready to take control of your secrets management? Contact our Customer Success team to experience the benefits of GitGuardian's integration with HashiCorp Vault today and build a more secure, resilient infrastructure.