Products & Technology

Why adopt HCP Vault Radar

HCP Vault Radar, enables teams to move from reactive firefighting to proactive secret remediation and management.

May 14 2025Chandni Patel, David Mills

Today’s development cycles move fast, sometimes too fast for security teams to keep up. In the rush to ship features, secrets like API keys, credentials, and tokens often end up unintentionally exposed in code, config files, and collaboration tools. These exposures introduce serious, often hidden, risks. In fact, the average cost of a data breach reached $4.9M last year, and the majority of these incidents began with stolen credentials, often due to human error.

This post will examine the growing risk of secret sprawl and explain how HCP Vault Radar offers a new approach to help SecOp teams effectively remediate exposed secrets and import them into Vault for secure, ongoing lifecycle management.

»Secret sprawl, a growing risk in developer environments

This challenge isn’t just a byproduct of speed, it’s amplified by broader trends across the industry. Shift-left security puts developers on point for security responsibilities earlier in the development lifecycle, but often without the tools or processes needed to enforce best practices, which means secrets often get hardcoded, shared informally, or pushed to public repos.

At the same time, multi-cloud and SaaS adoption have created fragmented, complex environments, and expanded the attack surface. Each of these platforms introduce their own authentication methods and access controls, increasing the risk of misconfigurations, making consistent secret governance difficult to enforce. Secrets are spread across clouds, services, and teams, and each unmanaged or exposed secret becomes a low-friction entry point for attackers.

Traditional security tools weren’t designed for this level of decentralization and leave SecOps teams without the insight or control needed to prevent exposure. As a result, secret sprawl has quietly become one of the most urgent and often overlooked security challenges in modern software development.

»Why it's time for a new approach

Not all secrets are created equal, and each one carries different risks based on its type, location, and usage. Organizations need more than just detection, they need the ability to prioritize and act with confidence.

That’s why HashiCorp launched HCP Vault Radar to help teams discover, remediate, and centralize the management of unmanaged secrets.

»Prioritize remediation of high risk secrets

When secrets are exposed, speed matters. Every second of delay increases the risk of compromise, and disruption. Vault Radar delivers the visibility and automation required to respond and remediate exposed secrets quickly and confidently.

Once a secret is surfaced, Vault Radar provides real-time notifications and structured remediation guidance tailored to the secret type, severity, and location. Instead of treating every secret the same, Vault Radar evaluates a set of key signals to determine which secrets pose the greatest threat to the business:

Signal	How Vault Radar prioritizes	Indicator of high priority secrets
✅ Version check	Flags secrets that appear in the latest version of a file	If the secret is live in the current version, it's more likely to be active and exploitable
✅ Entropy check	Detects high-entropy strings that resemble secrets	High-entropy strings (e.g. tokens, passwords) often signal sensitive information even if they don’t match known patterns.
✅ Activeness check	Checks whether secrets are currently in use	Active secrets pose immediate risk
✅ Vault correlation check	Identifies whether the secret is under management in HashiCorp Vault	If the secret is under management inside Vault, the finding is marked as ‘critical’

These signals enable teams to quickly assess the impact, cut through the noise, and prioritize those secrets that are active and unmanaged, dramatically improving both speed and precision of remediation.

»Automated and guided remediation workflows

Vault Radar integrates with tools like Git, Slack, PagerDuty, Splunk, Jira, and ServiceNow to trigger automated remediation workflows and alerts the moment a secret is discovered.

Instead of waiting for manual triage, Radar automatically generates enriched tickets and alerts that include critical context such as the secret author, type, time and date of introduction, location, severity, and length of exposure. With native remediation guidance provided for:

Vault Radar delivers tailored remediation guidance based on the nature of the incident, empowering teams to respond quickly, contain risk, and prevent escalation, all without adding operational overhead. It also provides teams with the flexibility to embed internal remediation best practices directly into the process, ensuring developers not only act fast but stay aligned with organizational best practices.

»Revoke, rotate, and recover. Without breaking systems

Taking action on exposed secrets must be done thoughtfully. An overly aggressive approach, like revoking a secret without visibility into its dependencies, can trigger service outages and break production systems. Vault Radar provides remediation guidance that considers system dependencies such as Git history, helping you respond without disrupting services.

Once secrets have been discovered, assessed, and prioritized, Vault Radar provides step-by-step guidance to help teams remediate exposure quickly and safely. By integrating with HashiCorp Vault, you can drive long-term security by ensuring all leaked secrets are properly rotated, stored, and secured:

Store the secret securely. Move the exposed secret into Vault for centralized and secure management.
Replace code references. Update the code to use a variable that retrieves the secret from Vault.
Rotate and reissue. Generate and securely distribute a new secret.

»Long term secret management with Vault

Once a secret has been identified, it should not be left unmanaged. With native integration between Vault Radar and Vault, teams can securely import secrets into Vault for long-term protection, centralized lifecycle management, and full auditability.

By storing secrets into Vault, you can:

Enforce role-based access policies to control who can access what
Enable dynamic secret retrieval, eliminating the need for hardcoding
Maintain comprehensive audit trails for compliance and incident response

Vault closes the loop by ensuring all secrets are properly tracked, managed, and protected, reducing future risk and simplifying governance.

»Proactive secret management, built to scale

Effectively managing secrets is foundational to protecting sensitive data, maintaining uptime, and meeting compliance requirements. But in today’s fast-paced, distributed environments, secrets frequently go unmanaged, creating hidden risks and vulnerabilities.

HCP Vault Radar, together with Vault, brings development and security teams together around a shared framework for detecting, remediating, and securing secrets at scale. Vault Radar handles detection and risk assessment, while Vault ensures secrets are properly rotated, stored and governed through their lifecycle. Together, Vault and Vault Radar transform secret management from a reactive, manual effort into a proactive, automated, and repeatable process, designed to support how modern teams operate.

Whether you're a developer responding to a leaked secret in your repo or a SecOps engineer triaging hundreds of alerts, Vault Radar delivers the context, prioritization, and remediation guidance you need to act fast, safely, and effectively. Vault then takes over to securely manage, rotate, and govern those secrets for long term protection.

Explore how HCP Vault Radar can help you get ahead of secret sprawl: