10 AWS Secrets Manager Best Practices

AWS Secrets Manager is a secrets management service that helps you protect access to your applications, services, and IT resources. Secrets Manager enables you to rotate, manage, and retrieve secrets securely.

In this article, we will discuss 10 best practices for using AWS Secrets Manager. By following these best practices, you can help ensure that your secrets are managed securely and efficiently.

1. Use the AWS Secrets Manager console to create and manage secrets

The AWS Secrets Manager console is a user interface that helps you securely store, rotate, and retrieve secrets. It also provides a number of features to help you manage your secrets, such as the ability to:

– Create and manage secrets
– Rotate secrets
– Retrieve secrets
– Delete secrets

Using the AWS Secrets Manager console to manage your secrets is the best way to ensure that your secrets are properly managed and secured.

2. Create a secret for each service or application that requires access to your database

If you have multiple services or applications that need to access your database, it’s important to create a separate secret for each one. That way, if one of the services or applications is compromised, the other secrets will still be safe.

Additionally, this will allow you to revoke access for just the one service or application that was compromised, without affecting the others. This is a much more targeted approach than revoking access for all services and applications that use the same secret.

3. Rotate secrets regularly, at least once every 90 days

If a secret is compromised, the sooner you rotate it, the less time an attacker has to use it. Additionally, by regularly rotating secrets, you ensure that even if one secret is compromised, the others are still safe.

To rotate a secret, simply create a new secret and update your applications to use the new secret. Then, delete the old secret. This process should be automated to make it as easy as possible.

AWS Secrets Manager makes it easy to rotate secrets with their built-in rotation feature. Simply enable rotation for a secret, and AWS Secrets Manager will automatically rotate the secret for you on a regular basis.

4. Configure automatic rotation of secrets

If a secret is compromised, it’s important to rotate it as soon as possible to prevent further damage. However, manually rotating secrets can be time-consuming and error-prone.

AWS Secrets Manager can help you automate the process of rotation, so you don’t have to worry about it. Simply configure Secrets Manager to rotate your secrets on a schedule that makes sense for your organization. For example, you could rotate your secrets daily, weekly, or monthly.

Configuring automatic rotation is a best practice because it helps you keep your secrets safe and secure, without having to put in the extra effort to rotate them manually.

5. Monitor the status of your secrets using CloudWatch Events

If a secret is compromised, you need to know about it as soon as possible so you can take action to mitigate the damage. CloudWatch Events allows you to set up alarms that will notify you if there are any changes to the status of your secrets.

You can also use CloudWatch Events to monitor for other events, such as when a secret is accessed or when a secret is about to expire. By monitoring for these events, you can take proactive action to prevent problems before they happen.

6. Store credentials in a separate account from the one used by your applications

If an attacker were to gain access to your application account, they would then have access to the Secrets Manager account and could easily retrieve any secrets stored there. By storing credentials in a separate account, you can limit an attacker’s access if they do manage to compromise your application account.

Additionally, you should also consider using IAM roles to further restrict access to the Secrets Manager account. For example, you could create an IAM role that only allows read access to the Secrets Manager API. This way, even if an attacker does gain access to your application account, they would not be able to call the Secrets Manager API and retrieve secrets.

7. Enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) on all IAM users who can modify or retrieve secrets

MFA adds an extra layer of security by requiring users to enter a one-time code from their MFA device in addition to their username and password. This makes it much harder for attackers to gain access to secrets, even if they have stolen a user’s credentials.

Enabling MFA is easy to do in the AWS console. Simply go to the IAM section, select the user you want to enable MFA for, and click the “Security Credentials” tab. From there, you can create and activate an MFA device for the user.

8. Do not store passwords as plaintext in your code

If an attacker were to gain access to your code, they would be able to see any passwords stored in plaintext. This would give them the ability to login to any systems or applications that use those passwords, and potentially wreak havoc on your company’s data and infrastructure.

Instead of storing passwords in plaintext, you should store them as encrypted strings. That way, even if an attacker gains access to your code, they would not be able to decrypt the passwords and login to any systems or applications.

To encrypt a password, you can use the AWS Secrets Manager console, the AWS CLI, or the AWS SDKs.

9. If you need to use an external credential provider, configure it to work with AWS Secrets Manager

If you’re using an external credential provider, such as Hashicorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager can help you manage and rotate your secrets. However, you need to configure it to work with AWS Secrets Manager. This is important because it allows you to take advantage of all the features that AWS Secrets Manager offers, such as automatic rotation and auditing.

Configuring an external credential provider to work with AWS Secrets Manager is not difficult, but it is something that you need to do in order to get the most out of AWS Secrets Manager.

10. Review the security best practices for Amazon RDS

AWS Secrets Manager is a great tool for managing secrets, but it’s important to remember that it’s just one piece of the puzzle. Amazon RDS is a managed relational database service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud.

While AWS Secrets Manager can help you manage the secrets used by your Amazon RDS database, it’s important to review the security best practices for Amazon RDS to ensure that your database is properly secured.

Some of the key security best practices for Amazon RDS include:

– Using strong passwords for your database user accounts
– Restricting access to your database using security groups
– Enabling encryption for your database

By reviewing the security best practices for Amazon RDS, you can be sure that your database is properly secured and that your secrets are safe.