Secrets Management for Developers

Hello Indie Hackers,

I have a background in systems engineering, internet infrastructure, DevOps, Cloud platforms (mainly AWS but also Openstack, vCloud, Google Cloud, etc), building Ci/CD pipelines, deployment/automation etc. One of the areas I'm currently interested is Cloud security and one of the most common issues I've noticed in last few years is when you work on a project/company and there is this need to secure secrets (think API keys, tokens, DB passwords) with your application in the cloud, but most of times, developers do something as easy as putting them in their git repo, encrypt them with a shared secret or even buying some product/service that no one will ever use properly because it's a major pain to setup (requires a lot of refactoring and will slow you down). Proper security is hard. New tools like Hashicorp Vault, Conjur CyberArk, try to solve this by getting rid of passwords entirely and rely on roles and policy settings for your application. For this to work properly, you will need integration with your Cloud infrastructure, setup services/appliances, modify your app, etc, it's a lot of work. I've used several tools in the past, mainly Blackbox, AWS with KMS but I think there must be an easier way to do it and started to experiment with a service that could host your secrets (in a way that encryption is done at a client side), and you should be able to assign groups of secrets to app roles with audit. Developers just decrypt secrets directly in their app without the need to use env variables or other services. I think this might only be a problem I'm solving for myself and of very little interest to others. Would like feedback, if any. Thanks.