Pls stop exposing your... secrets#

John Howard

• Why: Hard-coded credentials and verify=False on REST calls are endemic in network automation code, and the automation toolchain itself becomes an attack surface — squarely a network-security concern for the PM.
• What: A fast tour of HashiCorp Vault's built-in secret engines, showing a PoC instance that removes hard-coded creds from automation scripts at team scale.
• How: Standing up a Vault PoC and using a couple of its built-in engines to centralize secrets consumed by automation pipelines, addressing both the accidental-exposure problem and the DevSecOps friction it causes. (From abstract only — lightning-talk depth.)
• Where applicable: Broadly applicable; this is a generic, adoptable pattern rather than an org-specific one. Watch for the usual caveat that Vault itself becomes Tier-0 infrastructure your automation now depends on.