Beyond Secrets Manager: Designing Zero-Retention Secrets in AWS With Ephemeral Access Patterns

Secrets management in AWS has traditionally relied on long-lived secrets stored in Secrets Manager or Parameter Store. But as attack surfaces grow and threat actors become faster at exploiting exposed credentials, even rotated secrets begin to look like liabilities. The future of security in AWS leans toward ephemeral access, where credentials are generated just-in-time, scoped to the minimum needed permission, and vanish as soon as they are no longer needed.

This article explores how to build a zero-retention secrets architecture in AWS, one that minimizes persistent secrets and instead leverages IAM roles, STS, session policies, and Lambda-based brokers. No Vault, no standing tokens, just-in-time, context-aware access.