The widespread adoption of infrastructure automation tools like Ansible has significantly boosted DevOps efficiency, streamlining operations and enabling faster deployments. But implementing automation must be done responsibly. Replacing 24/7 human oversight with automated playbooks can introduce significant security risk, if the playbooks are not configured properly.
A common mistake teams make is hardcoding secrets directly into code bases and playbooks, which can cause them to be crawled by bots or even inadvertently posted to public libraries. Just recently, over 12,000 AWS keys and other secrets in GitHub repositories were exposed, possibly because of misconfigured automation
Luckily, there is a solution. This article will explain how to leverage Ansible Vault, a powerful tool built into Ansible, to encrypt credentials, passwords, and other secrets, and take complete control over the sensitive data passing through your automated workflows.
How does Ansible Vault work for secret management?
In DevOps, “secrets” encompass everything that grants users access to systems, services, or sensitive data. This could be passwords, API keys, private keys, or authentication
Managing secrets is crucial in IaC deployments. As intelligent as these systems are, they can’t differentiate sensitive data like passwords from any other configuration data. So, if secrets are hardcoded into automation scripts, tools like Ansible will treat them like any other variable, exposing them in logs, or even version control systems like
This is where Ansible Vault comes in. By using dynamic calls in your playbooks to access this secured repository, you can specify which files or variables contain credentials or other secrets, and encrypt them with AES-
The great thing about Ansible Vault is that you don’t have to encrypt entire files. You can choose to encrypt only a specific variable, such as an API key, while keeping the rest of the file in plaintext. This balances security with
Ansible Vault is easily activated, and it integrates seamlessly with Ansible playbooks, which are the driving force behind Ansible’s automation capabilities. It’s a simple, yet effective way to encrypt credentials and passwords so they don’t appear as plaintext in shared or public
On top of preventing public visibility of secrets, Ansible Vault is also great for access control within DevOps teams themselves to manage who can see and modify sensitive data. Role-based access control is a core security principle in DevOps, and while Ansible doesn’t provide a dedicated RBAC solution, Vault is a solid alternative.
Setting up Ansible Vault
Ansible Vault activates with the ansible-vault command. There are several ways you can use this command, depending on what you want to encrypt, and how you want to manage
The first option is to create a new encrypted file you can use to store secrets. The command for that would be ansible-vault create
Once entered, you will be asked to specify a password you will use to decrypt the file, or add new variables. After setting the password, you can open the file and start adding your secrets, which will then become encrypted. You can also encrypt an existing file, by entering the command ansible-vault encrypt
To encrypt specific variables, use the ansible-vault encrypt_string command. For example, to encrypt a database password, you can run ansible-vault encrypt_string ‘Password123”’ –name ‘
Here, we only encrypt the password (Password123), while the rest of the file remains
It’s also worth noting that you will have to provide the Vault password every time you try running a playbook containing an encrypted file or variable. This may sound tedious, but is a much-needed security measure.
Ansible Vault vs. other secret managers
Ansible Vault isn’t the only secret manager. Let’s see how it fares against two other popular ones: HashiCorp Vault and AWS Secrets
We will start with the similarities. All three use the same, industry-standard encryption protocol (AES-256). Access control is a key component of each tool, but it works a bit differently in Ansible, as it’s password-based, whereas HashiCorp and AWS are more policy-
Perhaps the biggest drawback with Ansible compared to these tools is that it does not offer automatic secret rotation. Users must manually update and re-encrypt secrets when they change. On the other hand, HashiCorp and AWS provide automated secret rotation. Also, while AWS Secrets Manager only works with AWS deployments, HashiCorp Vault and Ansible Vault work with all cloud providers and even hybrid architecture or local
Ultimately, users often don’t have much choice of which of these tools to use, as they will typically use the one associated with the broader platform or automation tool they are already working with. Nonetheless, it is helpful to know the differences, as it may impact which automation or infrastructure tool an organization adopts in the first place.
Conclusion
Hardcoded credentials in playbooks is a recipe for disaster when using Ansible. DevOps teams must remember to use Vault every time they want to store or reference sensitive data within their
We are already seeing what ignoring this basic security practice can do for organizations, as misconfigured automation scripts have led to major leaks and security incidents.
By making Ansible Vault a standard practice in your automation workflows, you can deploy with confidence, knowing that your sensitive data is encrypted, and only you know the password.
