I’ve spent a good chunk of my career watching people share credentials in ways that make security teams cringe. You join a company, you start doing work as an operator or developer, and pretty quickly you need a token, an API key, or some credential. Or someone needs one from you. And what happens? It ends up in a Slack message. Maybe a sticky note. Maybe—if you’re feeling really old-school—scribbled on a piece of paper and handed across a desk.
I’ve been building tools to solve this problem for a long time. At Netflix, they created something called InfoCrypt. At HashiCorp, I took an open-source project my friend Ryan at Slack had written called Flash Paper, rebranded it, and turned it into HashiPaper. When I joined ConductorOne, one of the first things I built was an internal version. Within my first month, that internal tool became a real product feature.
The Slack problem
Here’s what most people don’t think about when they drop a credential into Slack: in the connected age of modern workplaces, you have dozens of integrations and bots running across your channels. Putting a secret in the wrong channel can inadvertently expose a production credential to a third-party service. That third party gets breached down the line, and now your token has been stolen and you have no idea until someone is using it against you.
Even DMs aren’t great. Those messages persist. They’re searchable. They sit in retention policies and export logs. A secret shared in Slack has an indefinite shelf life in a place you don’t fully control.
Why we built it into ConductorOne
I view a secret like any piece of sensitive data: it needs to be governed and restricted. ConductorOne is already the source of truth for identity and access management. You’re already tracking who has access to what, and when, with robust audit records. Building secret sharing into the same platform where you manage access is a natural fit. You get access control and audit logging without having to bolt anything else on.
The other reason is trust. We heard from customers who were using free online secret-sharing services—tools where they had no idea who wrote them, no visibility into whether their secrets were being logged, and no one to call if something went wrong. There’s a real gap between knowing you should share secrets securely and having a tool you actually trust to do it.
Low-touch security that works
The version of secret sharing we built in ConductorOne is designed for the person who just needs to get a credential from point A to point B without overthinking it. If you’ve ever tried to share a secret through a password manager, you know the friction: put it in your personal vault, share it, then remember to go back and clean it up later. Or build a shared vault between specific people, and now you have credentials sitting around indefinitely. With something like HashiCorp Vault, you’re mounting paths, creating policies, and ensuring the right access controls are in place — powerful, but heavyweight for a quick share.
ConductorOne’s secret sharing strips that down to the essentials. You create a secret, choose your recipients, set an expiration and view limit, and share the link. The secret is encrypted in your browser before it ever leaves your device. ConductorOne stores only the encrypted blob — we never see your plaintext. When the view limit is reached or the expiration passes, the content is permanently deleted. No cleanup required.
You can share with internal team members who authenticate through SSO, or with external contacts who verify their identity through a one-time magic link. Files up to 1 GB, text, JSON, YAML, environment variables — it handles the formats you actually need when you’re sharing credentials, certificates, or config files.
Where this is heading
Secret sharing is the foundation. We have a lot of ideas for how to keep building on this—making it easier to share secrets without leaving the tools you already live in, tightening the integration between secrets and ConductorOne’s connector management, and reducing the number of steps between “I need to share this” and “done.”
I think of this as a great entry point toward better secrets management overall. When people start using secret sharing regularly, they’re in the platform more often. And the more familiar your team is with ConductorOne, the more natural it becomes to adopt stronger access hygiene across the board—least privilege, access reviews, all of it. A small habit of sharing secrets securely starts to shift how your team thinks about access.
Try it out
If you’re a ConductorOne customer, secret sharing is available now. Head to Secrets in the left sidebar and share your first secret. For technical details on the encryption model and security controls, check out our secret sharing docs.
If you’re not yet using ConductorOne, book a demo to see how secret sharing fits into the broader identity security platform.
