Dynamic Secret Injection for Microservices in the Cloud

Using new-generation architectures and microservices has enhanced the demand for secure and efficient secret storage. Static approaches such as credential hardcoding and manual rotation present systems with considerable threats and operational vulnerabilities. Dynamic secret injection is the modern approach to supplying temporary credentials, created on the fly, distributed, and limited by time and context of usage or access rights. Dynamic secret injection is further elaborated as a key solution to the current IT environment, where literature on the subject and the deficiencies of the suggested approaches are examined in detail within this paper. To better explain the concept, a framework with a demonstrated solution of HashiCorp Vault in Kubernetes environments has been supplied to show how well dynamic secrets work in complex structures and infrastructures. The infrastructure framework utilizes automated provisioning, short-lived credentials, and runtime secrets, minimizing existing attack surfaces. The paper correlates dynamic secret injection with DevSecOps practices, the Zero-Trust Security model and AI-based automation, its relevance in the protection of CI/CD pipelines, the enforcement of least privilege access, and machine learning to identify unusual behavior. Comparisons demonstrate its advantage over the static methods for the issues of safety, scalability, and working intricacy.