# Discover the Power of Polykey: An Open Source Secret Sharing System
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Chapter 1: Introduction to Polykey
Polykey.io is an open-source platform designed to facilitate the secure management and sharing of secrets. Secrets can encompass various types of sensitive information, such as passwords that grant access to websites, or private keys used for signing and verifying data. The core mission of Polykey is to enable users to store and transmit these secrets effortlessly while ensuring maximum security and control over their data.
Numerous security breaches have highlighted the inadequacies of current secret management tools in today’s digital landscape. Polykey addresses this gap by implementing zero-trust workflows that allow for secure sharing of secrets among individuals, teams, and machines, thereby facilitating the safe use of both digital and physical assets.
Section 1.1: Comprehensive Secret Management
Polykey efficiently manages a variety of sensitive information, including passwords, public and private keys, API keys, structured tokens, and certificates. Its nodes operate seamlessly across multiple platforms and devices, both on-site and in the cloud, removing the need for third-party storage. This setup enables end-to-end zero-trust delivery, ensuring that data ingress and egress are secure.
All secrets are organized within vaults—fully encrypted virtual file systems that maintain automatic version histories. Users can share these vaults with other Polykey agents, enhancing communication and computation security. The concept of secure communications is vital, as it relies on trusted identities, which Polykey refers to as the "Gestalt Identity."
Subsection 1.1.1: The Gestalt Identity Concept
When a Polykey agent is initiated, it creates its own gestalt identity linked solely to the Polykey node. Users can then connect their digital identities to this node, expanding their gestalt. As more agents are deployed, users have the ability to join existing gestalts, which facilitates secure sharing of secrets based on trusted identities. Essentially, your gestalt reflects the collective reputation of all your linked digital identities.
Section 1.2: Features and Functionality
The Polykey secret management system is designed to achieve several key objectives:
- Establish secure communication between decentralized trusted identities using a combination of Web of Trust (WoT) and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI).
- Prevent secret sprawl by offering a unified framework for managing all types of secrets, enabling interoperability across diverse workflows (CLI, Desktop GUI, API, Browser, Cloud Orchestration, CI/CD).
- Implement the principle of least privilege for individuals, teams, and machines through meticulous access control.
- Track, revoke, rotate, and audit secret usage across all Polykey instances.
- Ensure full decentralization, allowing users to maintain control over their data.
- Support modern encryption and decryption methods, including signatures and password hashing via Libsodium.
- Facilitate management of Polykey deployments within organizations through an enterprise control plane.
Chapter 2: The Significance of Secret Sharing
Secret sharing goes beyond merely protecting data; it involves delegating authority and, when feasible, subdividing that authority to ensure fine-grained, least-privilege access. Each secret functions as a token that enables manipulation of specific resources. Polykey provides robust interfaces and automation tools for managing structured secrets, tailored for developers, security professionals, and operations teams.
Polykey serves as a decentralized access control solution, enhancing the management, assignment, and delegation of authority to resources for distributed teams, individuals, and devices. By treating secrets—such as tokens, passwords, keys, and certificates—as the currency of access control, users do not need to possess extensive cryptography or cybersecurity knowledge to manage and share their secrets securely.
Furthermore, Polykey integrates seamlessly into software for automating secret workflows, bridging interactive password management with infrastructure key management. It operates as a decentralized, local-first solution that never uploads secrets to the cloud, providing easy backup and synchronization of secrets across all devices. With end-to-end encryption for all network communications and data encrypted at rest, Polykey ensures that your secrets remain confidential, even in the event of device loss or theft.
In conclusion, Polykey empowers users with complete sovereignty over their secrets, making it an invaluable tool worth exploring.
Discover more about Polykey's functionality and features in this enlightening video, "The PolyKey - YouTube."
Learn how a developer transformed a simulated .io game into a tangible reality in "I Turned a Fake .io Game Into a Real Game - YouTube."
For further exploration, visit Polykey on GitHub and their official website at Polykey.io.