CipherTrust Secrets Management vs OpenBao

CipherTrust Secrets Management, powered by Akeyless Vault, centralizes secrets, credentials, certificates, API keys, and tokens for DevOps tools and cloud workloads. It can create, store, rotate, and remove these items, with use cases including automated credential rotation, secrets sharing, just-in-time secret generation, and audit logs of secret use. Thales describes support for hybrid and multi-cloud environments, multiple tenants, on-premises systems, and legacy systems. Named integrations include GitHub, Kubernetes, and OpenShift. The product supports dynamic secrets, CI/CD injection, secret rotation, Kubernetes integration, and audit logs. Authentication standards listed are FIDO2.1, U2F, and WebAuthn, with NFC support; biometric unlock is not supported. CSM is available through self-hosted and web access, with a cloud deployment model also listed. It can run independently or alongside CipherTrust Manager, but needs a separate license. Pricing is on request, and a 90-day free trial is available.

OpenBao is a free, open-source system for storing and controlling access to secrets such as API tokens, encryption keys, passwords, and certificates. Management is available through a web UI, CLI, or HTTP API. Key/value secrets are encrypted before persistent storage, while dynamic credentials can be generated for Kubernetes and SQL databases and revoked when leases expire. Leases can be renewed, and individual secrets or groups can be revoked. OpenBao also encrypts and decrypts data without retaining it. Authentication methods include GitHub, LDAP, and AppRole, with token-based policies. Its storage barrier uses AES-256-GCM and verifies authentication tags during decryption. High-availability configurations are supported. Deployment options include packages, containers, binaries, source builds, and Helm; documentation covers Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, and Windows. Releases provide GPG signatures and SBOMs. Integrated Storage defaults to a 1 MiB maximum entry size, configurable with max_entry_size.