Secrets on AJTech

Azure Workload identity federation with Azure DevOps

Sun, 01 Oct 2023 20:09:40 +0000

About 2 months ago I wrote a blog post about workload identity federation with GitHub Actions. When an application needs to access cloud based resources it often needs to think about authentication and authorization. Using workload identity federation there is no need to use any keys or secrets. For example, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure are providing this great feature. And now this feature has also been released for Azure DevOps! This means that organizations can now take advantage of this to provide an even more secure way to connect to Azure from Azure DevOps, or rather Azure Pipelines, via a Service Connection.

Azure Workload identity federation with GitHub Actions and user-managed identity

Mon, 17 Jul 2023 18:01:21 +0000

Usually when running software workload (e.g. script or container-based applications) an identity is involved for authentication and access resources. Software workload running inside Microsoft Azure can use a Service Principal or (User)-Managed Identity. However, when running software workload outside Azure most of the times we have to use credentials (like secrets or certificates) in order to access Azure AD protected resources such as Azure Key Vault or Azure Storage. This can pose a risk since secrets needs to be stored somewhere and regularly rotated to improve security.

How to protect and discover secrets with Gitleaks?

Sun, 18 Jun 2023 11:32:41 +0000

Detecting and discovering secrets or (hardcoded) passwords in a code repository should be an ongoing process for everyone involved in code development. But this process should not take all the time so that we have more time to contribute to good code quality. Fortunately, nowadays there are various tools that help us to automatically check that no sensitive data is present. Secrets, such as API keys and passwords are a well-known example of this. Continue reading on how you can easily do this in your local dev environment with Gitleaks.