You do what you can. Eliminating long-lived keys isn't always possible; you set up rotation instead.

Does having to refresh the key every 6 weeks instead of every year or whatever actually make a meaningful difference security-wise?

At the minimum you’ll remember how to do it if you have to do it every six weeks.

Yes? That's a huge difference.

If the key becomes compromised, rotating the key sooner means you potentially limit the damage from unauthorised access.

I disagree, I think increasing manual toil (having to log into Sentry every 6 months to put in a new Jira token) increases fatigue substantially for, in this case, next-to-no security benefit (Sentry never actually has any less access to Jira than it does in the long-lived token case, and any attacker who happens to compromise them is going to be gone well before six months is up anyway).

Instead, the right approach in this case is to worry less about the length of the token and more about making sure the token is properly scoped. If Sentry is only used for creating issues, then it should have write-only access, maybe with optional limited access to the tickets it creates to fetch status updates. That would make it significantly less valuable to attackers, without increasing manual toil at all, but I don't know any SaaS provider (except fly, of course) that supports such fine-grained tokens as this. Moving from a 10 year token to a 6 month token doesn't really move the needle for most services.

This sounds more like a reason to automate token management than an argument for long lived tokens.

But then you just move the security issue elsewhere with more to secure. Now we have to think about securing the automation system, too.

This is the same argument I routinely have with client id/secret and username/password for SMTP. We're not really solving any major problem here, we're just pretending it's more secure because we're calling it a secret instead of a password.

Secrets tend to be randomly-generated tokens, chosen by the server, whereas passwords tend to be chosen by humans, easier to guess, and reused across different services and vendors.

How does this apply to ssh public keys?

> Long-lived production SSH keys may be copied around, hardcoded into configuration files, and potentially forgotten about until there is an incident. If you replace long-lived SSH keys with a pattern like EC2 instance connect, SSH keys become temporary credentials that require a recent authentication and authorization check.

It’s like 12 lines of terraform to fully automate this, inside your existing IaC infrastructure. It’s not complex.

Seems like you work in an organization with one developer. It's never just a "small configuration change" when you need to change the workflow and habits of your entire company.

I work for a gigantic tech company, and it’s still just a small configuration change.

What’s your excuse?

Why? If Sentry gets compromised, it's the exact same outcome—your Jira tickets get mined for production credentials and downloaded for random. What does automated token management save here?

How long the Jira access lasts depends on you / Sentry detecting and solving the initial intrusion. It doesn't matter how long the Jira token itself lasts if the attackers have access to the database in which its stored or log files in which its been dumped or something like that.

This assumes that the intrusion is persistent until Sentry catches it, that Sentry notifies me, that I successfully track all the places I have long-lived tokens that need to be rotated, etc.

OIDC with JWT doesnt need any long lived tokens. For example, I can safely grant gitlab the ability to push a container to ECR just using a short-lived token that gitlab itself issues. So the answer might be to ask your sentry/jira support rep to fast track supporting OIDC JWTs.

- https://docs.gitlab.com/ci/secrets/id_token_authentication/#... - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/id_roles_pr...