Using Secrets Safely with Agents

Overview

When AI agents handle secrets, credentials, API keys, tokens, or passwords with shell or AWS API access, they can call aws secretsmanager get-secret-value and receive plaintext values in their context window. This creates risk: secrets may leak into logs, conversation history, or downstream tool calls.

This skill teaches a safer pattern: dynamic references resolved at runtime by a wrapper script (asm-exec), so the agent never sees the secret value.

Best-effort defense, not a security boundary. This prevents the most common leakage path but cannot stop all evasion vectors. Combine with IAM least-privilege, CloudTrail monitoring, and VPC endpoint policies.

Rules

You MUST follow these rules when working with secrets: