CODEWITHSUNDEEP
amazon-web-services.net-core
user2208746
user2208746

Reputation: 83

How to store AWS Access Key and Secret Key in .Net Core API Securely

How in a work environment with different AWS environments say for example develop, staging and production is it best to store the AWS Access Key and Secret Key other than in the appsettings.json files in .Net Core? I know there is Secret Manager but not sure if that is the best way to store these two values. Looking for someone that may have done this specifically for production and how they handled this within their organization. Thanks for any information.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 2153

Answers (2)

jarmod
jarmod

Reputation: 78563

I believe that your application is running outside of AWS and that it needs to make API calls to AWS services, for example SQS. To make those API calls, your application needs AWS credentials.

Here are approaches for authenticating external applications in a machine-to-machine scenario. In your case, your client seems to need to be able to make arbitrary AWS service requests and that means using AWS signature v4 requests, signed using AWS credentials, which are ideally temporary, rotated credentials from STS rather than persistent credentials (such as IAM user credentials).

Typically, you would configure your application with a base set of IAM credentials that allow the application to assume an IAM role. That role itself, rather than the base credentials, would then give your application the permissions it needs to make SQS API calls etc.

The issue you face is how to securely store the base set of credentials. This is a problem that on-premise applications have had since day one, well before the cloud era, and there are various solutions, depending on the technology you're using.

Typically these credentials would be encrypted, not committed to code repos, and populated on the relevant, locked down application servers in some secure fashion. Some potentially useful resources:

Upvotes: 2

Harshil Kansagara
Harshil Kansagara

Reputation: 110

AWS Secret Manager securely stores your secrets until you retrieve them at runtime. If your going to be running your ASP.NET Core app in AWS, then AWS Secrets Manager is a great option, as it allows you to finely control the permissions associated with the AWS IAM roles running your apps.

Here are some faqs which were given from the AWS for secrets-manager service and which will clear your doubts also.

Here is the article which you can refer to for implementing secure secrets storage for .net core with AWS Secret Manager

Upvotes: 1

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