Breaking the Secret Zero Paradox: A Deep Dive into Cloud-Native Authentication

The "secret zero" problem refers to a chicken-and-egg dilemma in cloud-native applications, where securing access to secrets is crucial. To address this issue, modern solutions like Infisical focus on establishing and verifying identities rather than managing shared secrets. This approach involves leveraging existing identity providers, issuing short-lived access tokens, minimizing credentials, and automatically renewing them. By shifting the focus from "What do you have?" to "Who are you?", identity-based authentication provides a more robust foundation for modern applications, escaping the secret zero paradox and preventing "secrets sprawl".