Secrets are the keys to manage and enhance the security of a software application. Secret keys play a pivotal role in the authentication, authorization, encryption/decryption, etc. of data flowing through the application. There are various types of secrets and few of them are:

Encryption/Decryption keys: Keys to encrypt/decrypt data at various levels; e.g., REST, database, etc.
API keys: Keys to provide access to an exposed API
Credentials: Keys to provide credentials; e.g., database connection strings
SSH keys: Keys to provide SSH communication to server
Passwords: Keys to store passwords

It is very important to store these keys and ensure safety of the stored keys. A compromised key could lead to data leak, system compromise, etc., and to raise the security bar, it is required to ensure the secrets’ rotation and expiry. A manual secret rotation is cumbersome and challenging problem to solve. In this post, I will discuss about implementing an automated key rotation for AWS Secrets Manager.

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