Delinea, a solution provider that extends Privileged Access Management (PAM), has announced new features for DevOps Secrets Vault.

The DevOps Secrets Vault is Delinea’s high-speed vault to secure cloud-native applications for DevOps and DevSecOps teams. 

An updated policy editor improves the ability for administrators to set more granular access controls for secrets used in code, significantly reducing the time and complexity of setting up secrets management for DevOps teams.  

In a recent GitHub report, IT systems, open-source and entire software supply chains continue to be susceptible to exploiting keys unintentionally left in the source code, with 1 in 10 authors on GitHub having inadvertently exposed a secret in 2022. 

The number of hard-coded secrets surged by a significant 67% in 2022 compared to the previous year on GitHub. Using stolen or compromised credentials continues to be one of the most prevalent data breach causes. 

Delinea stores sensitive data like passwords, keys and tokens (otherwise known as secrets) in a fortified high-speed vault with stringent access controls. DevOps Secrets Vault allows developers to dynamically inject secrets into their code, significantly mitigating the risk of potential credential theft, which can result in unauthorised access without impacting performance. 

The newly updated policy editor provides greater flexibility by incorporating simplified policies that a single DevOps architect or administrator can use to set standards for multiple applications across multiple DevOps teams. 

Previously only accessible in the Command Line Interface (CLI), the policy editor has been enhanced and made available in the Graphical User Interface (GUI) of DevOps Secrets Vault. The CLI is generally the preferred interface for developers, while the GUI allows IT administrators to intuitively create, edit and delete policies and permissions documents.

Permissions documents are the building blocks for privileged access policies. With this update, administrators can create policies with multiple permission documents, providing more customisation within guidelines than previously available. 

With these enhancements, administrators can set finer controls over using secrets in code while reducing the time spent creating and managing policies. These granular policies ensure that the secrets only have the permissions needed for their intended use. 

Phil Calvin, Chief Product Officer at Delinea, says: “Many organisations are adopting strong DevOps practices to meet business needs and deliver better applications faster, putting pressure on DevOps teams to produce and update code more frequently, often at the cost of security.”

“Our continual updates to DevOps Secrets Vault ensure that our customers can quickly and easily create and manage more granular, secure access control policies for secrets across DevOps teams, reducing their attack surface without impacting developers’ productivity.”  

Delinea combines open-source tools and continual updates in its solutions, designed to implement secrets management and increase developer adoption seamlessly. Additional updates in this release include enhancements to the GUI and CLI to improve usability and flexibility, allowing developers to continue to work in their preferred interface.