Secret Management Best Practices

as modern architectures move toward cloud first and distributed environments, non human identities, such as applications, services, ci/cd pipelines, bots, and cloud workloads, are playing an ever larger role in your infrastructure but with great flexibility comes great responsibility these identities often need access to sensitive systems and data, which means they rely heavily on secrets api keys, tokens, private keys, credentials, and more if these secrets are mismanaged, hardcoded, or exposed, they create an easy attack path for threat actors in fact, exposed secrets are one of the leading causes of breaches today ( https //www verizon com/business/resources/tea/reports/2025 dbir data breach investigations report pdf ) so how can you stay ahead of this risk? here are best practices to keep secrets safe for non human identities 1\ store secrets in a dedicated secret manager first rule don’t store secrets in code non human identities should retrieve secrets at runtime from a secure secrets manager these provide encryption at rest and in transit access controls auditing automated rotation support it is also a good idea to ensure applications handle secret retrieval failures securely fail safely rather than falling back to insecure defaults 2\ use least privilege access non human identities should only have minimal permissions to the secrets they need, nothing more for example a ci pipeline limited to image assembly and linting doesn't need database credentials a staging environment should not use production secrets use iam roles and fine grained access policies to enforce this principle audit access regularly things drift 3\ rotate secrets frequently secrets for non human identities often go untouched for long periods, potentially becoming ticking time bombs, especially since they are often accidentally leaked instead implement automated rotation of credentials where possible ensure applications can gracefully handle rotation without downtime set up alerts for secrets that are aging beyond your acceptable window some aim for rotation schedules based on risk and privilege level the more sensitive the secret, the more often it should be rotated to learn more about secret rotation, go to https //howtorotate com/ 4\ continuously scan for leaked secrets even with the best intentions, mistakes happen a token gets committed to github a secret lands in a ci/cd log or slack message a legacy script uses a hardcoded password use automated tools to continuously scan your code repos, pipelines, chat systems, and cloud environments for leaked secrets but detection quality matters the wrong tool can overwhelm teams with noise and false positives, while the right one accurately prioritizes valid leaks and minimizes alert fatigue effective secret scanning like with trufflehog will focus your attention where real risk exists additionally, real time detection significantly reduces your window of exposure, allowing you to respond before attackers can exploit a leaked secret 5\ minimize secret footprint the fewer places secrets live, the smaller your attack surface use short lived, ephemeral credentials whenever possible avoid writing secrets to disk unless absolutely necessary sanitize logs to ensure secrets don’t appear in output consider using workload identify federation when available if you must use environment variables for short term secrets, ensure they are cleared once the process exits complement robust secret management with other application security controls (e g network segmentation) even if a secret is compromised, limiting its potential impact through other layers of security is vital 6\ use consistent naming conventions for secrets adopt standardized naming conventions to clearly indicate each secret’s purpose and scope for example prefix cloud api tokens with ca (e g , ca prod s3 access) prefix database credentials with db (e g , db staging readonly) this simplifies troubleshooting, auditing, and access reviews, especially in complex environments with frequent key rotations it also minimizes accidental misuse or revocation 7\ plan for leaks finally, be prepared have a clear incident response playbook for secret exposure that covers how to rotate and revoke affected secrets how to identify the impacted systems and identities how to communicate with internal stakeholders and customers how to harden your processes to prevent repeat exposures non human identities are fast, scalable, and flexible, but so are attackers a leak can spread faster than a human can react automation is your friend, use it to both detect and contain risk final thoughts managing secrets well for non human identities is no longer optional it’s foundational security hygiene by following these best practices, you can reduce risk, increase resilience, and give your teams the confidence to scale without fear of secrets becoming your weakest link and remember tools like trufflehog can help you catch what you missed, because even great processes need a safety net