Secrets management: identity bootstrap, short leases, rotation, and response

A secret is high-value authentication or cryptographic material with an owner, purpose, scope, version, lifetime, and revocation path. Workloads bootstrap with identity, retrieve only authorized short-lived material, and never treat storage encryption as lifecycle management.

Security invariants

• SECRET-C1: Central secret management applies access control, lifecycle, audit, availability, and incident policy instead of scattering plaintext values through code and configuration.
• SECRET-C2: Workload identity is the bootstrap for secret access so static credentials are not embedded in images or repositories.
• SECRET-C3: Short-lived dynamic credentials provide per-workload scope, attribution, expiry, and revocation where the target supports them.
• SECRET-C4: Rotation creates a new version, reloads consumers, verifies it, and revokes the old version under bounded overlap.
• SECRET-C5: Outage continuity is explicit and bounded by existing lease validity; required secret authorization does not fail open.
• SECRET-C6: Exposure response revokes or rotates material, investigates use, removes unsafe copies, repairs the leak path, and audits break-glass access.

Trust-boundary map

Topology edges represent authenticated or otherwise explicit communication paths. Responses reuse those physical paths in reverse; no response-only or bypass edges are added.

Executable scenarios

identity-bootstrap — Bootstrap without a static application secret

The platform attests workload identity and the secret manager authorizes that identity; no long-lived bootstrap credential is baked into an image or repository.

least-privilege-fetch — Fetch a least-privilege short lease

A workload receives only the exact secret version or dynamic credential it needs, with a bounded lifetime and no value in logs.

dynamic-credential — Prefer dynamic credentials when supported

Per-workload database credentials reduce sharing, enable attribution, and expire automatically instead of rotating one global password everywhere.

versioned-rotation — Rotate with explicit version overlap

Consumers reload a new version before the old version is revoked; overlap is bounded and rollback does not resurrect an already compromised value.

lease-expiry — Expired lease fails closed

A credential past its lease or cryptoperiod is not extended by a client clock or cached indefinitely; renewal requires a fresh authorized exchange.

manager-outage — Secret-manager outage has an explicit continuity policy

A workload may use an already issued unexpired lease if policy permits, but cannot obtain or silently extend credentials after expiry.

secret-exposure-response — Respond to a detected secret exposure

Detection starts containment: identify scope, revoke or rotate, remove the value from logs and history, investigate use, and repair the leak path.

break-glass-access — Break-glass access is exceptional and accountable

Emergency access is narrowly scoped, strongly authenticated, time bounded, independently alerted, and followed by rotation and review.

Operational and failure rules

• Every rejection path fails closed at the component that owns the decision; infrastructure failure is never converted into authentication, authorization, or integrity success.
• Retries preserve stable transaction identity, replay detection, bounded freshness, and audit context. A retry does not erase a prior success or compromise signal.
• Concurrent validation branches are independent checks. Completion requires every mandatory branch, and no check substitutes for another.
• Logs contain decision metadata and stable identifiers, not credentials, bearer tokens, cryptographic keys, or sensitive payloads.

Related concepts

Authoritative sources

1. OWASP Secrets Management Cheat Sheet
2. NIST SP 800-57 Part 1 Revision 5: Recommendation for Key Management
3. SPIFFE Workload API specification