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Comment by munchler | Hacker News Reader

I certainly agree with the desire to keep secrets out of logs, but isn’t the entire log itself also considered to be secret? Even a perfectly sanitized log probably contains lots of data about your production environment that you wouldn’t want to share with adversaries (e.g. peak usage hours).

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Logs probably need to be exposed to support teams, oncalls for sister-teams (if you are a large org), all your devs etc. That is many MANY more people than need access to secrets. Secrets in logs therefore puts you are much wider risk of internal threats and makes it MUCH easier for an attacker who phishes someone to pivot to higher credentials.

Also if you have audit records, you want accessing a secret to be logged separately from accessing logs.

There’s secret from an adversary and then there’s internal compartmentalization.

You could have 100s of people who have a business need to look at syslog from a router, but approximately nobody who should have access to login creds of administrative users and maybe 10s of people with access to automation role account creds.

Yes, but think defense in depth. Your team member who leaves for a competitor could tell them your peak usage hours, but he shouldn't be able to tell them all your customers' passwords.

PII is different from proprietary info. customer's email? PII. mask it. your code's stack trace? proprietary info. employees can see that to troubleshoot.

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