Secrets Management

When to Use

Design or repair secret retrieval, CI credentials, workload identity, access policies and rotation for an authorized system.

Inputs

Identify secret names and owners, consumers, environments, authentication mechanism and the rotation/recovery policy. Inspect configuration without displaying values.

Procedure

1. Choose the existing supported backend: Vault, a cloud secret manager or the host's protected secret store. Keep environment boundaries and minimum privileges explicit.
2. For Vault, read references/vault-setup.md. Development mode and root tokens are not production configuration.
3. For GitHub Actions, read references/github-secrets.md. Keep pull-request validation separate from privileged jobs. Supply values to the consuming process, never interpolate them into generated shell source or print them for debugging.
4. Prefer short-lived workload identity when the backend supports it. Check issuer, audience, workload/environment restrictions and denied access before enabling retrieval.
5. Rotate through prepare, consumer switch, verification and old-credential revocation. Use the backend's supported rotation protocol; retries must not leave the database and secret store on different credentials.
6. Inspect logs, error paths, artifacts and crash reports with synthetic secret markers. Record metadata such as operation, principal and outcome rather than values.