Best practice for Secrets Manager Usage

Question

What are the best practices in structuring the secrets in secret manager?

More specifically, if I have a vendor client-id and client-secret, should i store them separately as `prod/vendor/client-id` and `prod/vendor/client-secret` OR store then as `/prod/vendor-creds` and then use a JSON Object `{"client_id": "", "client_secret": ""}` as the value?

What if I have multiple secrets needed in the same service? would it be a good idea to store `prod/` and then just put all secrets in it as a JSON Object? (e.g., `{"vendor_client_id": "", "private_signing_key": "<>"}` etc?) -- This would allow my service to just call the secret manager api once on startup to get all credentials.

Didier Durand · Accepted Answer

Hi,

On your questions:

1) yes, you can structure the secret that you need with the JSON format that you present: it would be very close to what for example RDS does with its own secrets: create one and decode it with decryptSecret API to see how they look like

2) It may be interesting to keep 1 distinct secret for each client (if costs allow) to better respect the "least privilege" security best practice.  Some of your service features may not need to know all secrets at once.  In the future, it may be interesting to give access to some of the secrets to only some of the features. Also, from a hacking perspective (which I don't wish you), you'll be safer if your secrets are isolated: a hacker would have to decrypt each of them separately. It will be harder than just decrypting 1 secret to obtain all information about all customers.

Best,

Didier

Best practice for Secrets Manager Usage

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