Well-funded cybersecurity provider 1Password today introduced a new service that enterprises can use to protect infrastructure secrets such as encryption keys. 

The company also revealed that it has acquired Netherlands-based SecretHub to help it develop more features for the new service, which it’s launching under the name Secrets Automation. 

Toronto-based 1Password, incorporated as AgileBits Inc., is backed by $200 million from investors such as Accel. It provides a cloud platform that about 80,000 businesses use worldwide to manage the usernames and passwords with which employees log into work applications.

Secrets Automation, the new service 1Password introduced today, is also designed for managing sensitive data. However, it focuses not on employees login credentials but rather “secrets,” small files that organizations’ backend applications use to secure the data they work with. 

For example, when a financial forecasting application needs to access data from a company’s accounting system, it must send a unique password known as an API token before it can view the requested records. The company’s corporate website, meanwhile, broadcasts a piece of data called a security certificate to tell visitors’ browsers that launching a network connection is safe. Such secrets serve the same function as usernames and passwords, only for machine-to-machine interactions. 

With the newly launched Secrets Automation service, 1Password is promising to simplify secret management. The service provides a centralized interface that allows administrators to maintain their companies’ website security certificates, API tokens and other cybersecurity-related files such as encryption keys in one place. They can control which application can access what secret and limit how secrets may be used by each workload. 

The service offers integrations with several popular backend technologies including Kubernetes, HashiCorp Vault, Terraform and Ansible that will allow companies to manage secrets used by those platforms. There’s also a connector for GitHub thanks to a partnership that 1Password announced today with the Microsoft Corp. subsidiary. The connector will allow developers to manage the secrets of the applications that they develop with GitHub’s code hosting platform, the companies said. 

The main benefit 1Password promises to deliver through its new service is centralization. A large company can have upwards of hundreds of secrets that are often scattered among different teams and systems. The lack of centralized controls makes it difficult for administrators to prevent secrets from falling into hackers. Bringing everything together in one place, 1Password argues, allows administrators to manage secrets more consistently and thereby securely.

When secrets are hosted on a single platform, it’s also possible to track how they’re used more effectively. Secrets Automation is shipping with auditing features that 1Passoword says will allow companies to create a record of how users and systems interact with secrets, which is useful for breach detection purposes.

“We are the first company to bring both human and machine secrets together in a significant and easy-to-use way,” said 1Password Chief Executive Jeff Shiner. 

In conjunction with the product launch, the company today also disclosed that it has bought Netherlands-based firm SecretHub and hired members of its team to advance the engineering roadmap for Secrets Automation. SecretHub has developed a product similar to Secrets Automation that companies use to provide increased security for their applications’ sensitive data. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. 

Image: 1Password