> The researchers identified four fundamental security properties that CI/CD systems need: admittance control, execution control, code control, and access to secrets.
Why do CI/CD systems need access to secrets? I would argue need access to APIs and they need privileges to perform specific API calls. But there is absolutely nothing about calling an API that fundamentally requires that the caller know a secret.
I would argue that a good CI/CD system should not support secrets as a first-class object at all. Instead steps may have privileges assigned. At most there should be an adapter, secure enclave style, that may hold a secret and give CI/CD steps the ability to do something with that secret, to be used for APIs that don’t support OIDC or some other mechanism to avoid secrets entirely.
Why do CI/CD systems need access to secrets? I would argue need access to APIs and they need privileges to perform specific API calls. But there is absolutely nothing about calling an API that fundamentally requires that the caller know a secret.
I would argue that a good CI/CD system should not support secrets as a first-class object at all. Instead steps may have privileges assigned. At most there should be an adapter, secure enclave style, that may hold a secret and give CI/CD steps the ability to do something with that secret, to be used for APIs that don’t support OIDC or some other mechanism to avoid secrets entirely.