What is Keywhiz?
Keywhiz is a secret management and distribution service that is now available for everyone. Keywhiz helps us with infrastructure secrets, including TLS certificates and keys, GPG keyrings, symmetric keys, database credentials, API tokens, and SSH keys for external services — and even some non-secrets like TLS trust stores. Automation with Keywhiz allows us to seamlessly distribute and generate the necessary secrets for our services, which provides a consistent and secure environment, and ultimately helps us ship faster.
Keywhiz is a tool in the Secrets Management category of a tech stack.
Keywhiz is an open source tool with 2.6K GitHub stars and 217 GitHub forks. Here’s a link to Keywhiz's open source repository on GitHub
Who uses Keywhiz?
Developers
12 developers on StackShare have stated that they use Keywhiz.
Pros of Keywhiz
3
Keywhiz's Features
- Keywhiz Server provides JSON APIs for accessing and managing secrets. It is written in Java and based on Dropwizard.
- KeywhizFs is a FUSE-based file system, providing secrets as if they are files in a directory. Transparently, secrets are retrieved from a Keywhiz Server using mTLS with a client certificate.
- Presenting secrets as files makes Keywhiz compatible with nearly all software. Outside of Keywhiz administration, consumers of secrets only have to know how to read a file.
- KeywhizFs stores all secrets in memory only and never persisted to disk. If KeywhizFs is unmounted or the server loses power, all secrets will be safely removed from that server.
- To mitigate a Keywhiz Server outage, KeywhizFs maintains a local cache of previously accessed secrets. Unless the server is rebooted or KeywhizFs unmounted, applications can happily continue accessing secrets previously accessed.
- Keywhiz CLI is a Java program for Keywhiz administration. Clients, secrets, and groups can be queried, added, removed, or associated with each other. Users can authenticate and use the CLI.
- Keywhiz UI is web app for Keywhiz administration, similiar to Keywhiz CLI. The UI is built with AngularJS. Users can authenticate and use the UI.
- Keywhiz makes heavy use of mTLS and X509 certificates. It can even help distribute and rotate them for other services! There is the assumption of a PKI system though. If one does not exist or a PKI is wanted for development consider certstrap for a simple, initial PKI.
Keywhiz Alternatives & Comparisons
What are some alternatives to Keywhiz?
Vault
Vault is a tool for securely accessing secrets. A secret is anything that you want to tightly control access to, such as API keys, passwords, certificates, and more. Vault provides a unified interface to any secret, while providing tight access control and recording a detailed audit log.
AWS Secrets Manager
AWS Secrets Manager helps you protect secrets needed to access your applications, services, and IT resources. The service enables you to easily rotate, manage, and retrieve database credentials, API keys, and other secrets throughout their lifecycle.
Doppler
Doppler’s developer-first security platform empowers teams to seamlessly manage, orchestrate, and govern secrets at scale.
Docker Secrets
A container native solution that strengthens the Trusted Delivery component of container security by integrating secret distribution directly into the container platform.
Torus CLI
Torus simplifies the modern development workflow enabling you to store, share, and organize secrets across services and environments. With Torus, you can standardize on one tool across all environments. Map Torus to your workflows using projects, environments, services, teams, and machines.
