Why the lifecycle of secrets defines your security posture

Every secret has a lifecycle. From creation to retirement, each step either strengthens security or quietly weakens it.

In theory, secrets should be rotated, tracked, and revoked with care. In practice, they get copied into Slack, buried in environment variables, reused across environments, and left active long after their creator has moved on. By the time a leak or misuse is discovered, no one remembers where the secret came from or what systems it touched.

In 2023, developers leaked over 12.8 million secrets. These included API keys, tokens, private credentials, and other sensitive data spread across more than 3 million public GitHub code repositories. Most of those secrets remained valid for days after exposure, and only a few organizations quickly revoked them.

Similarly, in 2024, GitHub reported over 39 million leaked secrets. That’s three times more than the previous year. If the trend continues, over 100 million secrets could be exposed in 2025.

In this article, we’ll break down each stage in the secrets lifecycle, pinpoint where it usually fails, and show what modern teams do differently.

What is secrets lifecycle management?

Secrets lifecycle management is the practice of securely managing secrets such as API keys, database passwords, tokens, and certificates throughout their entire lifespan. This includes creation, storage, usage, rotation, monitoring, and retirement. Rather than treating secrets as static config values, secrets lifecycle management ensures they are handled as dynamic assets tied to real systems, users, and services.

The goal is to reduce risk by applying consistent secrets management practices across the full lifecycle. That means generating secrets securely, storing them in a controlled environment, injecting them only when needed, and rotating or revoking them as systems evolve.

The five stages every secret passes through

As mentioned earlier, secrets go through five phases in their lifecycle. The image below shows these stages and how they connect.

Secrets lifecycle

Now, let’s break down what actually happens at each phase, where things tend to fail, and what solid secrets management looks like in practice.

Secret creation

The security of a secret starts the moment you create it. If there is a misstep in how it’s generated or handled, that risk carries forward. In many teams, secrets are still created manually, copied from dashboards, generated on local machines, or passed around in Slack. This introduces exposure before the secret is even in use.

Automating secret creation reduces these early risks. Use tools or workflows that apply consistent standards and write secrets directly into a secrets manager. No copying credentials, no local storage, just encryption, access control, and audit logging from the start. If a secret is exposed during creation and that exposure isn’t tracked, rotating it later might help. But by then, it could already be in the wrong hands, with attackers gaining unauthorized access and potentially compromising your infrastructure. That’s why this phase is your first opportunity to get it right or to introduce a silent vulnerability.

Creating a secret securely is only the first step. If it’s stored poorly, all that effort goes to waste.

Secret storage

Once a secret is created, the location where it is stored directly impacts its security and manageability. Even a strong secret can become a risk if it ends up in the wrong place.

Secrets should never be hardcoded into config files or scattered across local .env and shared documents. These patterns are still common in legacy systems and early-stage setups, but they create persistent exposure, are difficult to monitor, and are nearly impossible to clean up completely.

Your storage strategy should center on a purpose-built secrets management system, one that handles encryption, access control, and logging by default. This gives you a simplified access management channel and ensures you know exactly who can access each secret and when.

Secure storage also lays the groundwork for the next phase of the secrets management lifecycle.

Secret usage and rotation

How you use your secrets matters just as much as how you create or store them. A well-protected secret can still cause damage if it’s overexposed or handled carelessly. Inject secrets only where and when they’re needed. For example, inject short-lived AWS credentials only at container startup.

Secrets should also be scoped to specific environments and never left behind in long-running processes. The more broadly a secret is accessible, the harder it becomes to track, revoke, or replace without breaking things.

Secrets rotation also comes into play here. If you don’t rotate secrets regularly, they become permanent keys that keep working long after their expiration. Therefore, you should incorporate tight usage and safe rotation together. Use dynamic secrets that are short-lived, injected at runtime, and tied into automated rotation workflows. That reduces the blast radius if something leaks. It also helps protect sensitive resources while keeping systems running smoothly when secrets change.

Secret monitoring and access management

If someone misuses a secret and there’s no proper monitoring in place, you won’t catch it until it’s too late, and attackers count on that.

However, with proper monitoring incorporated into your secrets' lifecycle, you catch issues early and quickly detect unexpected usage patterns or real-time access from strange locations. Coupled with auditing, you now get the full story, i.e., who accessed what, when, and from where. Compliance frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001, and HIPAA also require this level of visibility; they expect detailed access logs and proof of control.

Ultimately, your secrets management setup should make all activity traceable. Log every access, rotation, and change. Additionally, you should centralize those logs, make sure they’re tamper-proof, and connect them to your existing monitoring tools.

Secret retirement

Knowing when they're no longer needed is a big part of managing secrets. It's not unusual to forget old secrets after app decommissions, infra migrations, or team changes. But forgotten doesn’t mean harmless. The 2022 Toyota breach is a prime example. Toyota had a publicly exposed GitHub repo that contained hardcoded credentials, which allowed access to a customer data server. This exposed data from over 296,000 customers.

If a stale secret still works, it’s an open access point that attackers can easily exploit. You need a deliberate retirement process. Make sure to:

• Revoke secrets so they can’t be used again.
• Remove it from your secrets manager to avoid clutter and confusion.
• Delete any stored references in code, configuration files, or CI/CD pipelines.
• Invalidate it at the source, like the API or database it was tied to.

Secrets retirement also plays a big role in incident response and compliance. Regulators require you to track secrets and prove attackers can’t exploit old ones. Without proper retirement, secrets outlive their purpose and quietly expand your attack surface.

Secrets lifecycle and security best practices

The image above maps out the secrets lifecycle, alongside some of the security best practices we’ve just covered across each phase.

What happens when you ignore secrets lifecycle management

Many organizations treat secrets as a one-time setup task, i.e., something you generate, use, and forget. That shouldn't be the case. Secrets should follow a defined lifecycle, from creation to retirement, with controls at every stage. When that lifecycle isn’t enforced, secrets pile up, go untracked, and stick around far longer than they should. This kind of secret sprawl is one of the top reasons behind security breaches.

Beyond how safely you store secrets, how well you manage their entire lifecycle plays a huge role in your security posture.

Now that we’ve covered the five stages every secret passes through and the security best practices for each stage, let’s explore what effective secrets lifecycle management looks like in practice.

Building lifecycle-aware secrets management

Treating secrets as part of a lifecycle is how you build stronger, more reliable security. Rather than viewing secrets as static entities that only need to be stored securely, treat them as dynamic assets with a lifecycle that mirrors the systems and identities they support.

When you manage secrets with lifecycle awareness, your security moves from reactive to proactive. Your teams no longer scramble to revoke stale credentials during an incident, as they’ve already expired.

Instead of manually tracking who has access to what, access is automatically scoped, logged, and reviewed. And rather than trusting that secrets are being handled correctly, you have proof through audit trails, automated security policies, and clear rotation timelines.

To get there, you’ll need to integrate lifecycle principles into your secrets management system, workflows, and culture. Here’s a practical checklist to guide the shift:

• Automate creation with secure generation standards and immediate vault injection.
• Store secrets in a dedicated platform with access controls and encryption at rest.
• Inject secrets at runtime using the principle of least privilege, with no hard coding.
• Regularly rotate secrets on a schedule and after incidents using automated workflows.
• Monitor usage continuously with logs tied to real identities.
• Retire secrets based on expiration, service shutdowns, or role offboarding.

Teams use platforms like Doppler to automate rotation, inject secrets at runtime, and centralize auditing at scale.

Want to see what lifecycle-aware secrets management looks like in practice? Check out Doppler and start building smarter practices today.