Securing API keys and passwords

API keys and passwords are valuable for the reason most things are valuable: they cost money and the data protected by them are valuable. If you’ve ever watched any heist movie (and if you haven’t, I’d recommend Heat, which is a great movie) you know that there is always some sort of access code, signature, or safe combination that the heist team must acquire. This is because the idea of a secret code, passphrase, or encryption is perpetual throughout human civilization as a barrier to accessing sensitive information. Passwords existed for tens of thousands of years before computers even came around.

A heist team in the cyber domain will also try a similar strategy. They will attempt to extract passcodes and credentials from people who potentially have them so that they can acquire sensitive information. Sometimes, the information inside doesn’t even have to be sensitive, sometimes people just hack things because they are...