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AWS Secrets Manager

AWS Secrets Manager can be configured in multiple ways.

You can customize the vault object by configuring a vaults entity in Kong Gateway.

AWS Secrets Manager configuration

To configure the vault backend with AWS Secrets Manager, you need to configure Kong Gateway to have the required IAM roles to access any relevant secrets.

For example, to use the secrets management with AWS environment variable credentials, configure the following environment variables on your Kong Gateway data plane:

export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=<access_key_id>
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=<secrets_access_key>
export AWS_SESSION_TOKEN=<token>
export AWS_REGION=<aws-region>

The region used by default with references can also be specified with the following environment variable on your control plane:

export KONG_VAULT_AWS_REGION=<aws-region>

Note: When using AWS Vault as a backend, make sure you have configured system as part of the lua_ssl_trusted_certificate configuration directive so that the SSL certificates used by the official AWS API can be trusted by Kong.

Examples

For example, an AWS Secrets Manager secret with the name secret-name may have multiple key=value pairs:

{
  "foo": "bar",
  "snip": "snap"
}

Access these secrets from secret-name like this:

{vault://aws/secret-name/foo}
{vault://aws/secret-name/snip}

If you have an AWS Secrets Manager secret with multiple versions, you can access the current version or any previous version of the secret by specifying a version in the reference.

In the following example, AWSCURRENT refers to the latest secret version and AWSPREVIOUS refers to an older version:

# For AWSCURRENT, not specifying version
{vault://aws/secret-name/foo}

# For AWSCURRENT, specifying version == 1
{vault://aws/secret-name/foo#1}

# For AWSPREVIOUS, specifying version == 2
{vault://aws/secret-name/foo#2}

Note: The slash symbol (/) is a valid character for the secret name in AWS SecretsManager. If you want to reference a secret name that starts with a slash or has two consecutive slashes, transform one of the slashes in the name into URL-encoded format. For example:

• A secret named /secret/key should be referenced as {vault://aws/%2Fsecret/key}
• A secret named secret/path//aaa/key should be referenced as {vault://aws/secret/path/%2Faaa/key}

Since Kong Gateway tries to resolve the secret reference as a valid URL, using a slash instead of a URL-encoded slash will result in unexpected secret name fetching.

Configuration via vaults entity

The vault entity can only be used once the database is initialized. Secrets for values that are used before the database is initialized can’t make use of the vaults entity.

curl -i -X PUT http://localhost:8001/vaults/aws-sm-vault  \
  --data name=aws \
  --data description="Storing secrets in AWS Secrets Manager" \
  --data config.region="us-east-1"

{
    "config": {
        "region": "us-east-1"
    },
    "created_at": 1644942689,
    "description": "Storing secrets in AWS Secrets Manager",
    "id": "2911e119-ee1f-42af-a114-67061c3831e5",
    "name": "aws",
    "prefix": "aws-sm-vault",
    "tags": null,
    "updated_at": 1644942689
}

_format_version: "3.0"
vaults:
- config:
    region: us-east-1
  description: Storing secrets in AWS Secrets Manager
  name: aws
  prefix: aws-sm-vault

With the vault entity in place, you can now reference the secrets. This allows you to drop the AWS_REGION environment variable.

{vault://aws-sm-vault/secret-name/foo}
{vault://aws-sm-vault/secret-name/snip}

Secrets in different regions

You can create multiple entities, which lets you have secrets in different regions:

curl -X PUT http://localhost:8001/vaults/aws-eu-central-vault -d name=aws -d config.region="eu-central-1"

curl -X PUT http://localhost:8001/vaults/aws-us-west-vault -d name=aws -d config.region="us-west-1"

This lets you source secrets from different regions:

{vault://aws-eu-central-vault/secret-name/foo}
{vault://aws-us-west-vault/secret-name/snip}

Vault configuration options

Use the following configuration options to configure the vaults entity through any of the supported tools:

• Admin API
• Declarative configuration
• Kong Manager
• Konnect

Configuration options for an AWS Secrets Manager vault in Kong Gateway:

Common options: