How to Access AWS Secrets as Environment Variables Using Secret CSI Driver?

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Asked By CuriousCoder92 On

I'm currently working with the Secret CSI Driver and the AWS Provider plugin to fetch secrets from AWS Secrets Manager. However, I've set it up in a way that I'm not syncing these secrets to Kubernetes secrets. I've created a SecretProviderClass resource for my application, where I've defined the details like the region and the objects to retrieve. After defining the volume and volume mounts to access these secrets as files in my application pods, I'm stuck on how to inject those secrets as environment variables. I haven't enabled syncing my secrets to Kubernetes, so I'm wondering if I can use the path of the mounted file to set them as environment variables? Also, does my application need to support file-based env variables for this to work? I'm really confused as I'm new to this, and I would appreciate your guidance!

2 Answers

Answered By TechieTina47 On

You can actually use the `envFrom` in your pod template to map to a Secret resource, which will inject all key/value pairs as environment variables. However, since you're not syncing your secrets to Kubernetes, that's not an option here. Instead, you'd need to reference the mounted secret files directly in your environment variable definitions.

Answered By SecuritySavvyJonny On

Just a heads up, be cautious about using secrets as environment variables. They can leak easily through logs or debug output. Also, when mounted as files, if someone gets access to your container, they could read those files and steal your secrets. In my project, we switched to a Rust-based microservice that caches AWS secrets in encrypted memory. The pods call an API to fetch the secrets on startup, and we use IAM for authentication, which helps mitigate security risks. Make sure you're considering security implications!

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