Secrets Management

When to use

• Setting up or auditing a centralized secret store (Vault, cloud-native, or SOPS)
• Configuring runtime secret injection into Kubernetes pods or containers
• Designing secret rotation schedules and automation
• Hardening CI/CD pipelines to eliminate long-lived credentials
• Reviewing whether secrets are leaking via env vars, logs, or image layers
• Implementing OIDC federation to replace static cloud credentials in pipelines

Core principles

1. Never at build time — secrets injected at runtime, never baked into images or configs
2. Files over env vars — file-based injection doesn't leak via process listings or error reports
3. Rotate everything automatically — manual rotation processes become forgotten security debt
4. Least privilege per service — each workload gets only the secrets it needs, nothing more
5. Audit every access — every read from a secret store must be logged for forensic use

Reference Files

• references/vault-cloud-sops.md — Core principles, HashiCorp Vault HA/auto-unseal/KV v2/dynamic secrets/Kubernetes auth/audit backend, AWS Secrets Manager and GCP Secret Manager resource policies and rotation, SOPS encryption with KMS/PGP and Helm secrets plugin, Bitnami Sealed Secrets with kubeseal and key rotation schedule, rotation policy schedules by secret type (DB/API/TLS/SSH/tokens)
• references/injection-cicd.md — Zero-trust runtime injection patterns, Vault Agent Injector annotations, CSI Secret Store Driver SecretProviderClass, file-based injection preference rationale, startup env var validation pattern, GitHub Secrets and GitLab CI Variables scoping, OIDC federation for AWS and GCP from GitHub Actions/GitLab CI, CI log masking verification

Best Practices Checklist

1. No secrets in source code, Dockerfiles, or CI configs
2. Centralized secret store (Vault, cloud-native, or SOPS)
3. Automated rotation with defined schedules
4. Least-privilege access policies per service
5. Audit logging enabled for all secret access
6. Runtime injection, not build-time baking
7. OIDC federation for CI/CD cloud authentication
8. .env files excluded from version control