Terraform in Action

13 Security and secrets management

This chapter covers

• Securing state and log files
• Managing static and dynamic secrets
• Enforcing “policy as code” with Sentinel

On July 25, 2019, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) was discovered to have exposed over 6.2 million email addresses. It was one of the largest data breaches of all time. The vast majority of exposed email addresses belonged to average Americans, although thousands of university, government, and military personnel’s emails were leaked as well. The root cause of the incident was a publicly accessible S3 bucket. Anyone with an Amazon Web Services (AWS) account could access the emails stored in a spreadsheet named EmailExcludeClinton.csv. At the time of the discovery, ...