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Launch HN: Infisical (YC W23) – Open-source secrets manager for developers

231 pointsby vmatsiiakoabout 2 years ago
Hi HN, we’re the co-founders of Infisical (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;infisical.com">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;infisical.com</a>), an open-source platform to sync application secrets and configs across your engineering team and infrastructure. We enable teams to store their secrets in a centralized location and distribute them anywhere from local development processes to staging&#x2F;production environments.<p>Our Github is at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;infisical&#x2F;infisical">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;infisical&#x2F;infisical</a>.<p>We previously worked at AWS, Figma, and another startup, where we frequently ran into problems dealing with secret management. For example, many companies used .env files to maintain their development secrets and struggled to keep secrets in sync amongst their teams (this routinely posed security and efficiency issues — secrets can get leaked or go missing). Some companies (especially bigger ones) used solutions like Vault which can be difficult to set up, maintain, and afford.<p>While secret managers exist, they’re imperfect for many reasons: open-source solutions are either too complicated, not comprehensive, not user-friendly, or a mix of all three; there are nicer closed-source solutions but with no self-hosted options available. The gap we see is to make something that’s simple, open-source, and powerful.<p>On the open-source front, our goal is to provide full transparency of our codebase and enable anyone in the community to build anything they want in an optimal secret management solution. If you need any feature or integration that we don’t yet support, you can post an issue about it or directly send in a PR to be reviewed immediately.<p>You can inject the right set of secrets for any environment into your application by using the Infisical CLI together with your application start command (e.g. infisical run -- npm run dev). This removes the need to use a .env file. Everything stays encrypted with encryption&#x2F;decryption operations occurring on the client-side — under the hood, secrets are encrypted by vault keys for which there are multiple copies of vault keys encrypted under the public key of each member of a vault (ensuring only members of vaults can decrypt secrets pertaining to that vault locally). An alternative way is to use our Open API - though it’s a little complicated, and we’re working on adding SDKs to abstract away the cryptography.<p>Infisical integrates with staging and production cloud services like AWS, Vercel, GitHub Actions, and Circle CI. We also added support for integrations with Docker, Kubernetes, and Terraform. Infisical is now a central source of truth for secrets across the entire development cycle from development to production with new integration releases every week. One interesting thing is that, by default, our platform is end-to-end encrypted but users can opt out of that if they need to integrate with cloud platforms that require secrets to be sent in decrypted format (e.g. GitHub Actions, Vercel, Render). We’re the only solution that we know of that offers this E2EE-with opt-out ability.<p>Since our last Show HN (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34510516" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34510516</a>), we’ve layered authentication with 2FA (more MFA options coming soon) and upgraded all private key encryption&#x2F;decryption steps to involve a 256-bit protected key decrypted by another key generated via Argon2id KDF from the user’s password. We are starting the process of obtaining SOC2 and other security and compliance certifications. You can read more about our security here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;infisical.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;security&#x2F;overview">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;infisical.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;security&#x2F;overview</a><p>Beyond this, we’ve added integrations with PM2, AWS Secrets Manager, AWS Parameter Store, Circle CI, Travis CI, GitLab CI&#x2F;CD, Terraform and more. We’ve also redesigned the main dashboard and added more advanced organizational structure for secrets. Lastly, we have added role-based access control, and improved our Kubernetes operator: your clusters are now auto-redeployed when secrets in Infisical change. In the coming weeks and months, we plan to add features like secret rotation, improved audit logs, SDKs and alerts; as well as increase the range of our integrations; and continue fortifying platform security and stability.<p>We’ve launched this repo under the MIT license so any developer can use the platform. We don’t charge individual developers or small teams—all the integrations are fully available to everyone. We make money by charging a license fee for enterprise features as well as providing a hosted version and support.<p>If you found it interesting, you can see a demo video here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.loom.com&#x2F;share&#x2F;9a8904c6ecc84d0899d53ee1f7a36385" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.loom.com&#x2F;share&#x2F;9a8904c6ecc84d0899d53ee1f7a36385</a><p>We’d love for you to give Infisical a try (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;infisical.com">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;infisical.com</a>) and provide any feedback. If you&#x27;re interested, our code is available here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;infisical&#x2F;infisical">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;infisical&#x2F;infisical</a>. If we don’t have something, let us know and we’d be happy to build it for you. We look forward to your comments!

27 comments

linsomniacabout 2 years ago
TIL that systemd has a credentials component: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;systemd.io&#x2F;CREDENTIALS&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;systemd.io&#x2F;CREDENTIALS&#x2F;</a>
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s1k3sabout 2 years ago
&gt; All content that resides under any &quot;ee&#x2F;&quot; directory of this repository, if such directories exists, are licensed under the license defined in &quot;ee&#x2F;LICENSE&quot;.<p>Man I really hate how the term &quot;Open Source&quot; is used nowadays.
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ensignavengerabout 2 years ago
As soon as I see a product is open core, I immediately start wondering what critical features are going to be proprietary. I don&#x27;t see this information immediately on your website- is there a page where you outline what features you plan to keep proprietary?
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ianpurtonabout 2 years ago
Hi. I&#x27;m also working on an E2E secrets manager. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;purton-tech&#x2F;cloak">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;purton-tech&#x2F;cloak</a><p>A few tips.<p>1. It looks like I&#x27;m able to do account enumeration on your login page. For a secure app you want to make sure this is not possible.<p>2. Your CSP <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;csp-evaluator.withgoogle.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;csp-evaluator.withgoogle.com&#x2F;</a> has unsafe-eval. I would lock that down.<p>3. Your app seems to be JS based, which is OK but it means you have a whole bunch of supply chain attacks on nodejs to worry about. You should only run the bare minimum JS on the frontend when dealing with encryption keys.<p>4. You&#x27;re storing keys in local storage. There&#x27;s a trick you can do, if you store an actual CrypoKey object instead of a string and set non extractable to true you can stop JS extracting private keys.<p>5. For key stretching looks like your using Argon2-browser. Actually browsers come with a built in with PBKDF2 that runs faster than a JS based argon. So I&#x27;m able to get 10 million iterations in a few seconds which is an NIST recommendation.<p>6. Some of your dependencies look like they are not maintained anymore. i.e. argon2-browser.<p>This is what I was able to find so far. Hope this helps.
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iLoveOncallabout 2 years ago
Have you invested in automated testing since the last HN post?<p>Basic good practices like this being ignored does not give confidence in other aspects of the business and is a deal breaker for anything related to sensitive data like secrets.
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jedbergabout 2 years ago
Hey there, I wanted to offer you some unsolicited advice. You&#x27;re building a security product, so you have an uphill battle ahead of you. There is a reason security engineers get paid more than any other engineer, and why security companies can charge more -- because security is fraught with peril and just a single mistake can ruin your company&#x2F;career.<p>You need to show that you are extremely competent at security -- more so than anyone I can hire myself. You also need to show that you care deeply about security.<p>For example, the fact that you lock SSO behind a paywall says that you don&#x27;t care about security. Yes, SSO tends to be an enterprise ask, but it&#x27;s also important for two person companies. I&#x27;d suggest changing at least that part to be 10+ SSO users or something like that, and make the first few free.<p>Also, your response to security reports in this thread is not what I&#x27;d want from a security company. Sure, the right way to report these things is via email, but you should still be grateful for the free security audit you got and approach that with a bit more tact.<p>At least make it <i>look</i> like you care more about security than revenue and adherence to policy.<p>Good luck, it looks like an interesting product, just make sure you don&#x27;t turn users off with your security posture.
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Terrettaabout 2 years ago
OK, aside from &quot;open source&quot;, and assuming clients will be comparing paid enterprise to paid enterprise, how would you describe your value prop relative to Doppler?
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lopkeny12koabout 2 years ago
Does anyone have suggestions for a <i>truly</i> free-as-in-freedom and open source secrets manager? I&#x27;m so tired of seeing these quasi-open source products that dual-license their source code and lock essential features like SSO behind an enterprise paywall. Every one of these VC-funded startups always eventually goes down the drain as their backers seek to recoup these investment dollars.
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andersonmvdabout 2 years ago
previous discussion 2 months ago <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34055132" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34055132</a>
log101about 2 years ago
Not related but who or what tool designs these &quot;startup pages&quot;? I need it for my own work.
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warpabout 2 years ago
I thought there were a bunch of dead links on the page, but looking closer it&#x27;s actually the &quot;Star us on GitHub&quot; banner extending some invisible element to the bottom of the page and blocking certain elements from being clicked on. (Firefox 111 on mac).
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egorfineabout 2 years ago
Another issue, this one a blocker: Infiscal adds 2.2s to launch a process while I fully expected this delay to be incalculably small.<p>black:worker egor$ time infisical run &#x2F;usr&#x2F;bin&#x2F;true<p>Injecting 6 Infisical secrets into your application process<p>real 0m2.269s
nodesocketabout 2 years ago
How does the Kubernetes integration work? Can we specify a infisical secret to reference inside of a Kubernetes secret manifest yaml? Thanks.
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vishnumohandasabout 2 years ago
Hey, congratulations on the launch. How does this compare to EnvKey[1]?<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;envkey.com">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;envkey.com</a>
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rashidujangabout 2 years ago
Congrats to the Infisical Team! I was a first-time open source contributor thanks to this project and definitely could not have done that without the patience and guidance from the team.<p>Keep up the great work!
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e12eabout 2 years ago
Interesting that this uses mongodb[1] - doesn&#x27;t that mean the service is open under the mongodb license? Or does the managed service not use mongodb? Or did they (mongodb) go back to a more sane license? Or is the infisical Mongo image based off a fork?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Infisical&#x2F;infisical&#x2F;blob&#x2F;main&#x2F;docker-compose.yml#L47">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Infisical&#x2F;infisical&#x2F;blob&#x2F;main&#x2F;docker-comp...</a>
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w4eg324gabout 2 years ago
Why should someone use this when there are options within each Cloudprovider as well as Github and the like as well?
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hekikeabout 2 years ago
This is awesome! So no more pbpaste | base64 | pbcopy with Kubernetes secrets? I won&#x27;t miss base64 and yamls.
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egorfineabout 2 years ago
Minor bug: after execution of `infisical init` the resulting `.infisical.json` is executable on macOS:<p>black:worker egor$ ls -l .infisical.json -rwxr-xr-x 1 egor staff 122 Feb 28 11:19 .infisical.json*<p>(While minor, it&#x27;s still a glaringly obvious thing, I wonder how could that have been missed by your devs)
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vmatsiiakoabout 2 years ago
Also, check out roadmap and let us know if you have any suggestions: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.notion.so&#x2F;infisical&#x2F;be2d2585a6694e40889b03aef96ea36b?v=5b19a8127d1a4060b54769567a8785fa" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.notion.so&#x2F;infisical&#x2F;be2d2585a6694e40889b03aef96e...</a>
netikabout 2 years ago
What does this remotely offer that Consul and Vault already do, in an extremely good, Highly-available way?
chromatinabout 2 years ago
Website feedback:<p>Click to start video only works at the edges of the video, not the center (Firefox 110.0, MacOS)
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butterfly771about 2 years ago
It looks good! Look forward to more platforms, such as railway ,northflank
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aosmithabout 2 years ago
This is cool, LMK if &#x2F; when you&#x27;re hiring.
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mikaelnabout 2 years ago
Awesome work! Congrats on the launch.
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xs83about 2 years ago
I don&#x27;t see Terraform in your docs? Is it hidden away somewhere or not fully supported?
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naaabsabout 2 years ago
Great job team!!