AWS Secrets Manager

AWS provides the service AWS Secrets Manager for easier management of secrets. Secrets can be database credentials, passwords, third-party API keys, and even arbitrary text. You can store and control access to these secrets centrally by using the Secrets Manager console, the Secrets Manager command line interface (CLI), or the Secrets Manager API and SDKs.

In the past, when you created a custom application to retrieve information from a database, you typically embedded the credentials,the secret, for accessing the database directly in the application. When the time came to rotate the credentials, you had to do more than just create new credentials. You had to invest time to update the application to use the new credentials. Then you distributed the updated application. If you had multiple applications with shared credentials and you missed updating one of them, the application failed. Because of this risk, many customers have chosen not to regularly rotate credentials, which effectively substitutes one risk for another.

Secrets Manager enables you to replace hardcoded credentials in your code, including passwords, with an API call to Secrets Manager to retrieve the secret programmatically. This helps ensure the secret can't be compromised by someone examining your code, because the secret no longer exists in the code. Also, you can configure Secrets Manager to automatically rotate the secret for you according to a specified schedule. This enables you to replace long-term secrets with short-term ones, significantly reducing the risk of compromise.

Secrets Manager encrypts the protected text of a secret by using AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS). Many AWS services use AWS KMS for key storage and encryption. AWS KMS ensures secure encryption of your secret when at rest. Secrets Manager associates every secret with an AWS KMS key. It can be either the default AWS managed key for Secrets Manager for the account, or a customer managed key.

To learn more about what you can do with Secrets Manager, see the AWS Secrets Manager User Guide.