“Security is 1% technology plus 99% following the procedures correctly” — Tom Limoncelli

Having dealt with GPG last week at work, I remembered that I had intended to write a blog post about how we used GPG, Blackbox, and Paperkey to store secrets in Git at my previous job.

We used Blackbox to manage secrets that were needed during de­vel­op­ment, build, deployment, and runtime. These secrets included AWS cre­den­tials, Docker registry cre­den­tials, our private PyPI cre­den­tials, database cre­den­tials, and cer­tifi­cates. We wanted these secrets to be under version control, but also to be secure.

For example, we had a cre­den­tials.sh that exported en­vi­ron­ment variables, which was managed by Blackbox:

# Save current value