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Secrets Management

A secret is any sensitive piece of information required for API gateway operations. Secrets may be part of the core Kong Gateway configuration, they may be used in plugins, or they might be part of configuration associated with APIs serviced by the gateway.

Some of the most common types of secrets used by Kong Gateway include:

Data store usernames and passwords, used with PostgreSQL and Redis
Private X.509 certificates
API keys
Sensitive plugin configuration fields, generally used for authentication

Kong Gateway lets you store certain values in a vault. By storing sensitive values as secrets, you ensure that they are not visible in plaintext throughout the platform, in places such as kong.conf, in declarative configuration files, logs, or in the Kong Manager UI. Instead, you can reference each secret with a vault reference. For example:

{vault://env/my_secret_postgres_password}

In this way, secrets management becomes centralized.

Referenceable values

The Kong Admin API certificate object can be stored as a secret.

The following plugins have fields that can be stored as secrets in a vault backend. These fields are labelled as referenceable. See the documentation for each plugin to identify the referenceable fields:

Supported backends

Kong Gateway supports the following vault backends:

Environment variables
AWS Secrets Manager
GCP Secret Manager
HashiCorp Vault

See the backends overview for more information about each option.

Beta and general availability phases

As of 2.8.1.3, this feature is enabled by default. Due to conflicts with previous releases of Kong Gateway, the endpoints for secrets management in the Admin API have changed from the previous /vaults-beta prefix to /vaults with vaults_use_new_style_api=on set in kong.conf.

If you are running a Kong Gateway 2.8.x version before 2.8.1.3:

Set vaults=bundled in your kong-conf file to enable secrets management
Use the /vaults-beta Admin API endpoints

Get started

For further information on secrets management, see the following topics: