Confidant

Confidant manages managing and securing sensitive credentials in cloud environments by providing a centralized and encrypted secret storage solution. It stores secrets in Amazon DynamoDB, ensuring they are encrypted at rest, which is a crucial aspect for compliance and security.

The technical architecture of Confidant is built around two primary concepts: secrets and their mappings to services. Secrets are stored as credential pairs (key-value pairs) and are revisioned, meaning no revision is ever deleted. This approach allows for a detailed history view, enabling users to track changes and revert to previous revisions if necessary. The system integrates with AWS IAM roles, allowing services to be mapped to specific IAM roles, which simplifies the management of credentials across different services.

Operationally, Confidant requires careful management of credential keys to avoid conflicts, especially when mapping multiple credentials to a single service. The system's design emphasizes the uniqueness of keys within a credential and across all credentials mapped to a service. However, with the project being archived as of January 31, 2025, any new deployments or existing users will need to consider the lack of future updates, support, and security patches.

From a technical standpoint, Confidant's use of DynamoDB for storage means it inherits the scalability and performance characteristics of DynamoDB, but it also introduces potential costs associated with data storage and retrieval. The encryption at rest is handled using AWS's built-in encryption mechanisms, ensuring that data is secure even in the event of unauthorized access to the underlying storage. Despite its robust features, the impending archiving of the project highlights the need for alternative solutions that will continue to receive support and updates.