Bitwarden brings open source security and zero knowledge encryption to secrets management

To better serve developer, DevOps, and IT teams Bitwarden announces Secrets Manager, a new solution to easily and securely manage privileged secrets across the development lifecycle. 

Available in open beta, Bitwarden Secrets Manager helps these teams tackle common developer challenges, including the decentralized management of secrets across multiple systems and services.

Developers utilize various applications and multi-cloud infrastructure for their work which often leads to secrets like API keys, certificates, and credentials being distributed across company environments with no consolidated platform to manage access. With this lack of centralized secrets management, development teams struggle to gain control over their credentials, forcing them to hard-code secrets or share secrets with teammates via unsecure, unencrypted means.

With insecure secrets handling, businesses are more susceptible to unauthorized access and data breaches — leading to serious consequences. According to a recent GitGuardian report, 5 million credentials and other secrets get leaked on GitHub every year. In addition, other solutions on the market today are complex and difficult to set up and do not adequately scale with developer needs. 

Bitwarden Secrets Manager delivers a secure, end-to-end encrypted solution for storing, managing, automating, and sharing secrets at scale across the development lifecycle. With one central location for secure secrets storage, Bitwarden Secrets Manager minimizes the hard coding of secrets, prevents unauthorized access to privileged systems, and enables developers to be more productive.

Why Bitwarden Secrets Manager is the best choice for managing developer secrets:

• One platform for all secrets - Centralize the management of infrastructure secrets and user passwords to one tool and stop the secrets sprawl across your development ecosystem. 

• Powerful encryption - With end-to-end, zero knowledge encryption, Secrets Manager keeps privileged credentials safe and secure.

• Open source security you can trust - Bitwarden is trusted by millions of users and businesses worldwide to securely store credentials and other sensitive information.

• Transparent pricing - The open beta will be free for all users and future pricing models will be predictable and straightforward.

• Flexibility for teams of all sizes - Secrets Manager offers custom operations with an SDK and command-line interface. The ability to self-host will be available in future releases.

Bitwarden Secrets Manager empowers businesses and individuals to be safer online by protecting their sensitive information, ecosystems, and credentials with end-to-end, zero-knowledge encryption, and open source security.

The Bitwarden open source code base allows users to validate first-hand the safety and privacy of the application. Bitwarden zero-knowledge encryption further safeguards your team’s sensitive information by fully encrypting all information in your vault — Bitwarden has no knowledge of information in your vault and cannot access it.

The combined power of Bitwarden Secrets Manager and Password Manager allows businesses to experience complete enterprise security coverage across the organization. For developers ready to embrace passwordless technologies, Bitwarden Passwordless.dev provides an API framework for quick development of FIDO2 WebAuthn and passkey features.

Discover how the Bitwarden product portfolio solves your enterprise security challenges.

Anyone can get started! To enable Secrets Manager, first ensure you have created a Bitwarden account and are part of an organization — can be free or paid. Once you have an account and an organization, the beta can be enabled from the admin console of the web app. For more step-by-step instructions for enabling Secrets Manager beta, visit the Bitwarden Secrets Manager beta homepage.

If you would like to submit beta feedback, do so through the Bitwarden Community forum, GitHub, or email smbeta@bitwarden.com.

Editors note: Secrets Manager beta has ended since this article was published. To get started with Bitwarden Secrets Manager, sign up for a free account or start a 7-day business trial.