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At Manifold, we help developers discover and use innovative tools and technologies; so you can focus on building, not managing, your applications. Each new cloud service we use today introduces complexity in the form of another bill, account to manage, credential to secure, and code to deploy.

Today we’re solving this problem through Torus and the Manifold platform. Torus simplifies your development workflow by enabling you to store, share, and organize secrets across services and environments. While, Manifold allows you to build and offer cloud services to developers without having to worry about billing, identity, and credential distribution (An example of one such service: JawsDB).

We’re a small, remote-friendly venture-backed company based in Halifax, Canada with teams in Toronto and San Francisco. With a shared passion for making developers lives easier and our backgrounds reflect that, having worked at the likes of Red Hat, Heroku, and Salesforce.

Apply for the Backend / API Engineer at https://jobs.alongside.com/details/backend--api-engineer/160...

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Comment · 9 years ago

At it’s heart, Torus is public-key infrastructure, users/machines derive and encrypt asymmetric key pairs from their password. These key pairs are then uploaded and signed by the Torus server using a key endorsed by our root signing keys (always kept offline in a sealed and secured environment).

This enables Torus to establish a web of trust (much like gpg), allowing clients to retrieve and validate (by navigating down the web of trust) public signing and encryption keys for other users or machines. Using these validated keys, clients can encrypt secrets for each other without ever sending the secret (or any material used to encrypt it) to the server.

Vault, on the other hand, operates under a centralized encryption model with all secrets encrypted using keys encrypted by the root master key. For a vault cluster to boot up, the vault must be unsealed which complicates it’s high availability story — for a cluster to cold start it must have access to the master key.

The onus is on operators to properly store, transmit, and leverage the master key to unseal the vault which requires a certain level of sophistication to do properly. If the root key were to be lost or compromised, then all of the secrets would be as well.

Torus uses a decentralized model and builds on-top of the privilege of least privilege — users and machines only have access to the secrets they require. Making it far easier to operate as a cloud service (no cold start problem) and ensure that we never have access to your secrets.

We don’t see Torus as only a security tool, instead, we see it as a productivity tool by focusing on making it super easy to set, audit, and rotate secrets when a machine is compromised, developer leaves, or key is committed to git.

Comment · 9 years ago

With Torus, you can use our fine grained access controls to model exactly how your organization divvies up access and responsibilities. You can give a team (users or machines) access to everything, a specific environment, or even a specific service instance within an environment.

Only users or machines with explicit access can retrieve the encrypted secrets from our servers and they are never written to disk in plain-text.

With our worklog(1) feature, we make it really easy to rotate secrets when a team member leaves, commits them to git by accident, or a machine is compromised by listing out every secret they could access cryptographically.

For small teams and deployments, we want to make it easy for them to keep their secrets out of git without having to securely manage and deploy heavier tooling such as Vault or Keywhiz.

1) https://www.torus.sh/docs/latest/commands/organizations#work...

Comment · 9 years ago

At Manifold(1), we built Torus from the ground-up to solve a consistent pain when building cloud apps: securely storing, sharing, and rotating secrets used to build, run, and deploy code. Our goal is to make it simple for anyone, not just the security savvy, to keep their secrets out of git and off disk.

To do this, we designed our security model (host and cryptography architecture) for hosting in the cloud to ensure we never have access to any of the keys used to encrypt or sign secrets — they’re derived from a user’s password and never forwarded along. We’ve posted more information in our documentation(2).

The server is currently closed source, with plans to open source it. The client (where all cryptographic operations happen) is open source.