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Discussion on: Configure Symfony Secrets with Hashicorp Vault

 
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Alexander Frolov

First of all speed of regex (pcre2 library) may surprise your greatly) Second - to parse env on the most basic level you just need to split the line by = and process quotes on the right... but I digress


Nothing in logs sound like the app read a partial file

That's why I mentioned atomicity - this will guarantee that file always updates as a whole and instantaneously. Hypothetical scenario I'm talking about looks like this

  • credentials rotation is triggered by timer
  • credentials are changed in vault
  • now there is some time between actual update in central vault and vault-agent reaction
  • after that there is some time between vault-agent updating .env file and app reading it
  • even after that there is a possibility when app read old .env file (in the beginning of the request) and 1ms later .env was updated

In all last three scenarios credentials that app has in memory are already obsolete. That will not matter for already established connections but should matter greatly for new ones.

The only way I see to mitigate it is to rotate "whole credentials" as user/password pair altogether and keep old ones active for a little while after update. In which case I am quite curious about how it's handled say with database of any kind where user/password is not enough, you also need provide the same level of permissions (say to database / tables / operations)

Ok. Nevermind, found my answer here learn.hashicorp.com/tutorials/vaul...

Sorry to bother๐Ÿ˜