Show HN: Tswap–Yubikey-backed secret injection for IaC and AI-assisted workflows

1 point

3 months ago

I built tswap after noticing that Claude Code, while genuinely useful for managing a Kubernetes cluster, was pulling plaintext secrets from every manifest it touched. I wanted the AI to be able to do its job without ever seeing the actual values.

tswap keeps secrets in an AES-encrypted vault file on disk. The decryption key is derived from a YubiKey via HMAC challenge-response. At init you pair two YubiKeys — either unlocks the vault, so you have no single point of hardware failure.

Config files use a comment-based placeholder that keeps them valid YAML:

    stringData:
      DB_PASSWORD: # tswap: db-password

Deployment is a pipe:

    tswap apply values.yaml | helm upgrade myapp ./chart -f -

The privilege split is the key design decision: `apply`, `run`, and `check` need no elevation (AI agent gets these). `get`, `list`, `delete`, and `export` require sudo/admin (human gets these). The AI can deploy; it can't read or enumerate secrets.

Other features: burn tracking for rotation, `redact` for stripping values from logs, `check` for pre-deploy validation, `export`/`import` for vault migration.

Single binary, no daemon. Tested on Linux, macOS, and Windows.

https://github.com/stevedcc/TokenSwap