veldstra.org blog

Creator of artillery.io. DevOps & Node.js contractor in London. • h@veldstra.org • @hveldstra

Using KMS to encrypt sensitive data (and using it for Serverless secrets)

kms-vault is a tiny shell script that can be used to encrypt sensitive data such as passwords or private keys using a master key from AWS KMS.

Using kms-vault

First, download the shell scripts and put it somewhere in your $PATH.

To encrypt a text file:

#
# My-KMS-Key is a key you created in KMS, see:
# http://docs.aws.amazon.com/kms/latest/developerguide/create-keys.html
#
kms-vault encrypt My-KMS-Key private_key.pem > private_key.pem.encrypted

To decrypt an encrypted file:

#
# We don't need to specify the name of the key here because that information is 
# stored in the metadata in the encrypted blob of data:
#
kms-vault decrypt private_key.pem.encrypted

(It goes without saying that if you delete the master key that was used to encrypt a file, you won’t be able to recover the plaintext.)

Why KMS?

  1. If you create an AWS-managed master key, it never leaves AWS. That’s one less thing for you to worry about protecting.
  2. All the usual IAM facilites can used for access control with all of its power and flexibility.

The combination of 1 & 2 makes kms-vault very handy for storing all kinds of secrets inside git repos for example. There’s no need to share a password as is the case with ansible-vault, and access to keys can be controlled with IAM policies on AWS accounts of other members of your team.

Finally, AWS Lambda integrates with KMS, which makes kms-vault a nice simple solution for managing secrets in Serverless-based projects (this is reason I whipped up kms-vault in the first place).