AWS — Secrets Manager Overview

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Abstract

can help secure secrets by encrypting them with encryption keys that you manage using AWS Key Management Service (KMS). It also integrates with AWS’ logging and monitoring services for centralized auditing. For example, you can audit AWS CloudTrail logs to see when Secrets Manager rotates a secret or configure AWS CloudWatch Events to notify you when an administrator deletes a secret.</p><p id="0e72"><b>Pay As You Go </b>Secrets Manager offers pay as you go pricing. You pay for the number of secrets managed in Secrets Manager and the number of Secrets Manager API calls made. Using Secrets Manager, you can enable a highly available secrets management service without the upfront investment and on-going maintenance costs of operating your own infrastructure.</p><h2 id="696f">Secrets Manager Key Points</h2><ul><li>Using Secrets Manager, you can secure, audit, and manage secrets used to access resources in the AWS Cloud, on third-party services, and on-premises.</li><li>You can configure VPC endpoints to keep traffic between your VPC and Secrets Manager within the AWS network.</li><li>Compliance with Standards: Secret Manager covers the auditing and compliance requirements of security standards such as HIPPA, PCI, ISO 27001, SOC and more.</li><li>Versioning: Although you typically only have one version of the secret active at a time, multiple versions can exist while you rotate a secret on the database or service. Whenever you change the secret, Secrets Manager creates a new version. Each version holds a copy of the encrypted secret value. It tracks these different versions by using staging labels.</li><li>Programmatically retrieve encrypted secret values at runtime.</li><li>You can store different types of secrets. You can also store JSON documents.</li></ul><h2 id="0e94">Use Cases</h2><ul><li>Eliminates the need of hard-coded sensitive information as plain text. Secrets Manager enables you to replace hard-coded credentials (e.g. passwords, connections strings, API keys) in your code, with an API call to Secrets Manager to retrieve the secret programma

Options

tically. This helps ensure the secret can’t be compromised by someone examining your code, because the secret no longer exists in the code.</li><li>Manage secretes from central place. If you had multiple applications with shared credentials and you missed updating one of them, the application failed. Because of this risk, many customers choose not to regularly rotate credentials, which effectively substitutes one risk for another.</li></ul><h2 id="bd4d">Alternatives to AWS Secrets Manager</h2><ul><li><a href="https://readmedium.com/aws-difference-between-secrets-manager-and-parameter-store-systems-manager-f02686604eae">AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store</a></li><li><a href="https://readmedium.com/keeping-secrets-safe-in-asp-net-core-with-azure-key-vault-228a1409bb3a">Azure Key Vault</a></li><li><a href="https://readmedium.com/azure-introduction-to-azure-app-configuration-f4a4c43ec5db">Azure App Configuration</a></li><li><a href="https://www.hashicorp.com/products/vault">Hashicorp Vault</a></li></ul><blockquote id="d787"><p>Find Sample source code of AWS Secrets Manager in .NET Application on <a href="https://github.com/a-patel/aws-secrets-manager-dotnet-labs">GitHub</a>.</p></blockquote><p id="e127"><b>View more from <a href="https://medium.com/awesome-cloud"><i>Awesome Cloud</i></a></b></p><ul><li><a href="https://readmedium.com/aws-difference-between-sqs-and-sns-61a397bf76c5"><i>Difference between SQS and SNS</i></a></li><li><a href="https://readmedium.com/aws-difference-between-application-load-balancer-and-network-load-balancer-cb8b6cd296a4"><i>Difference between Application load balancer and Network load balancer</i></a></li><li><a href="https://readmedium.com/aws-amazon-eks-vs-amazon-ecs-comparison-difference-between-eks-and-ecs-7451abd23859"><i>Difference between EKS and ECS</i></a></li><li><a href="https://readmedium.com/aws-difference-between-secrets-manager-and-parameter-store-systems-manager-f02686604eae"><i>Difference between Secrets Manager and Parameter Store</i></a></li></ul><p id="5f41"><i>Happy Clouding!!!</i></p></article></body>

TL;DR

AWS Secret Manager enables you to easily rotate, manage, and retrieve database credentials, API keys, and other secrets throughout their lifecycle. It is one central location to keep all credentials secure. It helps you protect access to your applications, services, and IT resources. There is no need to update the application code.

Features of Secrets Manager

Rotate secrets safely AWS Secrets Manager helps you meet your security and compliance requirements by enabling you to rotate secrets safely without the need for code deployments. For example, Secrets Manager offers built-in integration for Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon DocumentDB and rotates these database credentials on your behalf automatically. You can customize Lambda functions to extend Secrets Manager rotation to other secret types, such as API keys, OAuth tokens and other credentials. Retrieving the secret from Secrets Manager ensures that developers and applications are using the latest version of your secrets. You can rotate secrets on a schedule or on demand by using the Secrets Manager console, AWS SDK, or AWS CLI.

Manage access with fine-grained policies With Secrets Manager, you can manage access to secrets using fine-grained AWS IAM policies and resource-based policies. For example, you can create a policy that enables developers to retrieve certain secrets only when they are used for the development environment. The same policy could enable developers to retrieve passwords used in the production environment only if their requests are coming from within the corporate IT network.

Secure and audit secrets centrally Using Secrets Manager, you can help secure secrets by encrypting them with encryption keys that you manage using AWS Key Management Service (KMS). It also integrates with AWS’ logging and monitoring services for centralized auditing. For example, you can audit AWS CloudTrail logs to see when Secrets Manager rotates a secret or configure AWS CloudWatch Events to notify you when an administrator deletes a secret.

Pay As You Go Secrets Manager offers pay as you go pricing. You pay for the number of secrets managed in Secrets Manager and the number of Secrets Manager API calls made. Using Secrets Manager, you can enable a highly available secrets management service without the upfront investment and on-going maintenance costs of operating your own infrastructure.

Secrets Manager Key Points

Using Secrets Manager, you can secure, audit, and manage secrets used to access resources in the AWS Cloud, on third-party services, and on-premises.

You can configure VPC endpoints to keep traffic between your VPC and Secrets Manager within the AWS network.

Compliance with Standards: Secret Manager covers the auditing and compliance requirements of security standards such as HIPPA, PCI, ISO 27001, SOC and more.

Versioning: Although you typically only have one version of the secret active at a time, multiple versions can exist while you rotate a secret on the database or service. Whenever you change the secret, Secrets Manager creates a new version. Each version holds a copy of the encrypted secret value. It tracks these different versions by using staging labels.

Programmatically retrieve encrypted secret values at runtime.

You can store different types of secrets. You can also store JSON documents.

Use Cases

Eliminates the need of hard-coded sensitive information as plain text. Secrets Manager enables you to replace hard-coded credentials (e.g. passwords, connections strings, API keys) in your code, 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.

Manage secretes from central place. If you had multiple applications with shared credentials and you missed updating one of them, the application failed. Because of this risk, many customers choose not to regularly rotate credentials, which effectively substitutes one risk for another.