Why we need short-lived credentials and how to adopt them

Static, long-lived credentials or “secrets” (e.g. passwords, API keys, SSH keys) remain one of the most significant security vulnerabilities in modern infrastructures. Rotating these credentials manually is time-consuming and not scalable. Canva realized it needed a better secrets automation and management system when teams had to stop work on development priorities in order to do rotations:

"We had to stop what we were working on and divert engineers away from priorities."
— Moe Abbas, Senior Engineering Manager and Cloud Governance Lead, Canva

Adopting a centralized secrets manager is the first step to removing the biggest risk in your IT environment. Getting your secret rotation on a fixed schedule (daily, weekly, monthly) is a common best practice. But to truly minimize the risks of credential theft as much as possible requires adoption of “dynamic” secrets (sometimes called “ephemeral secrets” or “just-in-time secrets”). By issuing short-lived credentials that expire automatically — often within minutes or hours — organizations can drastically minimize the attack window if a secret becomes compromised.

This post will cover:

• Real-world reasons to adopt dynamic secrets, focusing on cloud native and CI/CD use cases.
• Two roadmaps — for managers and architects — to guide teams from static rotation schedules to fully dynamic, on-demand secrets.
• Common hurdles (organizational, operational) and how to integrate Vault with popular CI/CD tools.

»What are short-lived credentials?

Short-lived (ephemeral) credentials are dynamic secrets that automatically expire after a brief, predefined period — typically minutes or hours. Unlike static secrets that are manually rotated, dynamic secrets are generated on-demand and revoked automatically upon expiration.

»How they work:

• Generation: When access is requested, a secrets manager like Vault creates new credentials with a limited time-to-live (TTL).

• Issuance: Vault issues the credentials along with a lease ID that tracks their lifetime.

• Usage: The client uses these credentials for a specified period, with the option to renew if needed.

• Revocation: At lease expiration or upon manual trigger, Vault automatically disables or deletes the credentials.

This approach significantly narrows the window of vulnerability compared to long-lived static secrets, aligning well with secured-by-default practices and zero trust principles.

»The advantages of short-lived credentials

There are a few key, risk-mitigation advantages gained from implementing secrets automation that supports short-lived secrets and credentials:

»Attack surface reduction

This is often called: minimizing “blast radius”. A static credential might remain valid for weeks, months, or years after being leaked. By contrast, a short-lived (dynamic) secret is automatically revoked after just minutes or hours, leaving attackers with a tiny window — if any — to exploit stolen credentials.

»Real-world example:

Netflix engineered a short-lived SSH certificate system (“Bless”) specifically to ensure employees only have valid credentials for a brief window. Once credentials expire, even if someone manages to intercept them, they’re effectively useless. Netflix detailed this approach at various security conferences, noting the minimal overhead and strong security benefits.

»Automated revocation and zero trust

Dynamic credentials align perfectly with zero trust principles, where each request must be re-verified with a new credential. If you detect suspicious behavior, you can instantly revoke credentials, removing human error from rotation schedules. This agility is invaluable for compliance frameworks (PCI-DSS, HIPAA, GDPR) that demand rapid response to potential breaches.

»Ideal for cloud native and CI/CD pipelines

Dynamic credentials map naturally to containerized and short-lived jobs. Rather than embedding secrets in Kubernetes config files or Jenkins job definitions, your pipelines fetch them on-demand, drastically reducing the risk of accidentally committing credentials to source control or logs.

»Removing manual complexity

Dynamic secrets automate what many teams do manually (i.e., rotating credentials on a calendar). HashiCorp Vault’s dynamic secrets engines handle creation, distribution, and revocation, freeing developers from manual tasks and reinforcing a culture of “secured by default.” As an intermediate step, if fast-rotating dynamic secrets are too sudden of a change for some teams, automated rotation on a time-schedule rather than a dynamic time-to-live (TTL) countdown is a great start to ending workflow slowdowns and reducing the blast radius of credential theft.

»From rotation to dynamic secrets: A manager’s roadmap

Even when the benefits of dynamic credentials are clear, transitioning from static secrets isn’t always straightforward. From cautious teams to sprawling infrastructure, here are some of the most common hurdles — and how you might gently ease your way past them without disrupting your entire operation.

»Overcoming organizational inertia

It’s natural for teams to question why they should swap out something that seems to “work fine.” After all, if you’ve been rotating credentials for years without catastrophic failure, why risk trying a whole new approach?

»Start small, show quick wins

If you try to overhaul all secrets at once, you’ll likely face pushback. Instead, pick a low-stakes service or a single CI/CD pipeline, implement short-lived secrets there, and measure the results. Perhaps you’ll notice fewer credentials showing up in logs or more straightforward audit trails. Sharing these early victories can encourage the broader organization to embrace change.

»Lead with metrics

Humans respond to data. Track and communicate the measurable benefits such as:

• The reduction in service tickets associated with secrets management
• The reduction in work hours needed for secret rotations
• The reduction of risk impact — how much time an attacker had to use a stolen credential previously vs now.
• The reduction in risk likelihood — the number of credentials brought under management and encryption vs the number of previously exposed and sprawled secrets.

Real numbers can quell skepticism faster than any white paper.

»Tackling infrastructure complexity

Enterprises rarely operate in a neatly contained environment. You might have an on-prem datacenter humming away while also juggling cloud services across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Each environment can have its own security mandates, identity providers, and network quirks.

»Phased centralization

Jumping straight to dynamic secrets across multiple clouds and on-prem resources is daunting. Instead, gradually funnel secrets into a single point of control — like a Vault deployment configured with a clear set of policies. Once you prove dynamic secrets work in one environment, replicate that success in others.

»Unified auth, flexible policies

Vault supports a variety of authentication methods — LDAP, OIDC, userpass, etc. As you build out dynamic secret support, it’s best to standardize on one or a limited set of auth methods to limit complexity.

For instance, you might use LDAP or OIDC for human users (to leverage existing SSO) and AppRole for service-to-service authentication. This prevents each team or application from “reinventing” an entirely new login workflow, reduces policy sprawl, and makes it easier to audit who accessed what and when.

Many enterprises run multiple auth backends to serve distinct needs (e.g., employees vs. microservices), however, as you scale, you should minimize the proliferation of methods so that teams aren’t juggling half a dozen different ways to sign into Vault for the same use case. Keeping it consistent at scale helps maintain simpler policy management and clearer auditing.

»Reassuring developers about tooling and workflows

One of the biggest fears for developers is the dreaded “credential expired mid-build” scenario. Short-lived secrets sound great in theory, but do they mean constant re-authentication chores?

»Offer accessible integrations

Developers thrive on good tooling. If you’re using Jenkins, GitLab, or GitHub Actions, show how dynamic secrets can be fetched automatically at the start of each job, and have a TTL that safely lasts as long as they think it will take for the job to complete — no manual overhead required. There’s mature documentation to set this up as well: See these Jenkins + Vault tutorial or CI/CD integration docs.

For other environments, (e.g. on-prem VMs, Docker containers without a built-in Jenkins/GitLab integration), consider Vault Agent. It can automatically authenticate to Vault and renew short-lived secrets, writing them to a local file or environment variable. This reduces the custom code you’d need to write in order to handle token renewals, especially if you’re not in a full-blown CI system. You can also use lightweight scripts — like a shell script that calls vault token renew on a schedule, however, Vault Agent is a more robust solution because it handles re-authentication and credential refresh seamlessly in the background.

»Explain the payoff and reduced toil

Emphasize the reduced management headache when they start to clean up secret sprawl. Not only that, but they’ll also be reducing their workload with dynamic secrets since they’ll eliminate most manual rotation tasks. The more you can illustrate genuine convenience — fewer help-desk tickets, no risk of leaving credentials in logs — the more likely it becomes that developers will embrace the shift.

»Managing operational overhead

Short-lived secrets, by definition, pop into existence and vanish frequently. If you’ve got thousands of microservices or a bustling CI/CD pipeline, that can mean a lot of requests against your Vault deployment.

»Scale thoughtfully

If you already know your pipeline runs 500 builds a day, each requiring dynamic secrets, make sure you’ve sized Vault appropriately. Setting up a high availability (HA) backend and performance replication for cross-region scenarios can prevent bottlenecks.

»Monitor proactively

Keep an eye on Vault metrics — request rates, error counts, CPU usage — so you spot scaling issues early. Tools like Prometheus and Grafana can help visualize trends. If you see a big jump in requests after rolling out dynamic secrets, it might be time to add more capacity or optimize your TTL values.

»From rotation to dynamic secrets: An architect’s roadmap

Now that you have a roadmap for the human and managerial elements of dynamic secrets adoption, let’s look at a process roadmap from an architectural and technical perspective.

»1. Find existing secrets

Before migrating a large codebase to dynamic secrets, you need to collect all credentials — scattered environment variables, config files, and spreadsheets — into a single Vault deployment. There are tools that can scan repositories and environments and help you identify embedded secrets (HCP Vault Radar, for example). This helps teams quickly spot environment variables and hard coded secrets so that you can quickly replace them with references to Vault.

»2. Identify a use case and test

Identify a low-risk use case where dynamic secrets will have a large impact (like CI/CD pipelines or short-lived microservices) and introduce dynamic secrets there first. Before moving to fully dynamic secrets, schedule rotations for any existing long-lived credentials, keys, or certificates using Vault’s database, SSH, and PKI secrets engines. This step not only reduces reliance on static credentials but also provides operational insights:

• How frequently are credentials accessed?
• Are services picking up updates reliably?

Analyzing these metrics helps refine TTLs and confirms your environment can handle frequent updates. Once rotations run smoothly, you’re ready to introduce truly on-demand (dynamic) secrets, assured that applications can adapt to shorter-lived credentials.

»3. Integrate dynamic secrets with common CI/CD tools

Once the references to Vault are in your code, you can start using dynamic secrets.

• Jenkins: Use the Vault plugin to retrieve dynamic secrets at build time.
• GitLab: Leverage GitLab’s CI variables to fetch Vault-stored secrets via CLI, discarding them after job completion.
• GitHub Actions: Use the Vault GitHub Action (or a custom action referencing Vault’s API) to pull dynamic secrets at the start of a workflow. The Vault GitHub Action can authenticate using OIDC or another supported auth method, then retrieve secrets from a dynamic secrets engine (e.g. database/creds/my-role).

»4. Implement monitoring and policies

Vault’s audit logs and UI allow you to visualize and track dynamic secret requests and automatically revoke or deny suspicious requests. You can forward logs to an SIEM solution like Splunk or Datadog for real-time alerting. This ensures dynamic secrets don’t slip under the radar — even though they appear and vanish quickly.

»Key takeaways

Short-lived dynamic credentials dramatically reduce risk and are much more secure than long-lived static secrets. By centralizing secrets in Vault, automating rotation, and gradually moving services to dynamic secrets, you align with zero trust principles and actually reduce the workload of operators — boosting speed and security simultaneously, without trade-offs. Here are the general principles to remember for dynamic secrets adoption:

• Start small with a pilot (e.g. a single microservice or pipeline) to demonstrate success.
• Integrate dynamic secrets with Jenkins, GitLab, or GitHub Actions for frictionless CI/CD.
• Reduce manual complexity for developers switching to dynamic secrets.
• Scale Vault with HA and performance replication for global reliability.
• Monitor dynamic secret issuance with robust logging, SIEM integration, and near-expiry alerts.

»A real example in action

In a follow-up post titled: Configuring dynamic secrets for a PostgreSQL database using HashiCorp Vault, we’ll walk you through an operator’s roadmap to building out an example dynamic secrets setup with Vault, with complete code samples.

If you’re looking into a more modern, holistic approach to security, governance, and compliance, share our solution brief with your colleagues: Securing and governing hybrid and multi-cloud at scale.

You can also check out this demo session from HashiConf 2024 covering the why and the how of transitioning from static to dynamic secrets management:

Looking for some case studies to back up your push for short-lived credentials? Watch Why You Need a Faster Secrets Rotation Strategy and share the full transcript.