Catalog
concept#Security#Platform#DevOps#Governance

Secret Management

Concept for securely storing, distributing and managing credentials, keys and certificates across distributed systems.

Secret management covers practices and patterns for securely storing, distributing and rotating credentials, keys and certificates in distributed systems.
Established
Medium

Classification

  • Medium
  • Technical
  • Architectural
  • Intermediate

Technical context

CI/CD systems (e.g. GitLab CI, GitHub Actions)Orchestrators (e.g. Kubernetes, Nomad)Cloud provider IAM and KMS services

Principles & goals

Principle of least privilege: services receive only minimal required rights.Automate rotation and revocation processes.Centrally defined policies for access, audit and lifecycle.
Run
Enterprise, Domain, Team

Use cases & scenarios

Compromises

  • Compromised management token can expose many resources.
  • Misconfigured access policies can lead to overprivilege.
  • Insufficient rotation increases dwell time of leaked keys.
  • Use short-lived and automatically rotating credentials.
  • Implement role-based access control and least-privilege principle.
  • Enable comprehensive audit logs and monitor access metrics.

I/O & resources

  • Inventory of existing secrets and access paths.
  • Organization's roles and access models.
  • Integration points (APIs, CI/CD, orchestrators).
  • Central secret repository with policies and audit logs.
  • Automated rotation and revocation processes.
  • Metrics and evidence for compliance audits.

Description

Secret management covers practices and patterns for securely storing, distributing and rotating credentials, keys and certificates in distributed systems. It frames architectural, operational and governance concerns including centralization, access controls and automation. The aim is to reduce leaks, support compliance and ensure reliable handling of secrets in production environments.

✔

  • Reduces risk of credential leaks via centralized control and rotation.
  • Facilitates auditability and compliance reporting.
  • Improves operational stability through automated processes.

✖

  • Adoption requires integration effort with existing systems.
  • Central stores can be single points of failure if not operated highly available.
  • Not all legacy applications support dynamic secrets without changes.

  • Number of rotated secrets

    Measures how many secrets were successfully rotated in a timeframe.

  • Mean Time to Rotate (MTTRot)

    Average time from detection of compromised secret to rotation.

  • Number of accessing entities per secret

    Indicates potential overprivilege or secret-sharing.

HashiCorp Vault deployment at a payments provider

Central management of API keys and TLS certificates with automated rotation.

Kubernetes secrets with external provider

Storing sensitive data in an external secrets store instead of Kubernetes objects.

CI/CD integration using ephemeral tokens

CI runners receive temporary access tokens for deployment tasks instead of long-lived keys.

1

Take inventory of existing secrets and dependencies.

2

Choose a secret management solution and design the architecture.

3

Gradually integrate with critical workloads and CI/CD.

4

Introduce rotation, audit and emergency procedures.

⚠️ Technical debt & bottlenecks

  • Hardcoded secrets in legacy apps that are hard to remove.
  • Temporary workarounds implemented without long-term rotation.
  • Incomplete auditing and missing history of access changes.
Secret sprawlRotation complexityAccess model misconfiguration
  • Storing API keys in plaintext in git repos.
  • Manual key rotation without rollback mechanisms.
  • Operating central store without high availability and backups.
  • Underestimating integration effort for legacy systems.
  • Policies that are too restrictive and block automation.
  • Lack of monitoring allows undetected misuse.
Operation and configuration of secret stores (e.g. Vault)Security principles such as RBAC, least privilege and KMSCI/CD and deployment automation
Confidentiality and access controlScalability of distribution and rotationAuditability and compliance
  • • Legacy applications lacking API support for external stores.
  • • Regulatory constraints on data storage and transfers.
  • • Budget and operational capacity for high availability.