Amazon’s managed secrets storage and rotation service for storing, retrieving, and automatically rotating credentials for AWS services and third-party applications.
AWS Secrets Manager handles credential storage and automatic rotation for teams operating primarily within AWS, with native integrations for RDS, Lambda, and other AWS services. The structural limitation for workload authentication is that workloads must still authenticate to AWS before they can retrieve a secret, typically through IAM roles or instance profiles, which means the bootstrap credential problem is shifted rather than eliminated. Aembit eliminates the bootstrap by attesting the workload’s identity cryptographically and issuing short-lived credentials directly at the moment of access, without any stored credential at any layer. For use cases where AWS Secrets Manager remains in the stack — legacy integrations, third-party SaaS credentials, or AWS-native systems that require static secrets — Aembit integrates with Secrets Manager as a credential provider, governing which workloads can retrieve which secrets and under what conditions.
For workload and agent authentication, Aembit replaces AWS Secrets Manager because:
– Workloads must authenticate to AWS (via IAM role, instance profile, or access key) before they can retrieve a secret from Secrets Manager. Aembit attests the workload’s runtime identity directly and issues credentials at access time, with no stored credential required at any step.
– Secrets retrieved from Secrets Manager are held in memory or environment variables by the application after retrieval. Aembit credentials are short-lived and injected at the network layer, so the application never holds them.
– Secrets Manager does not enforce conditional access policies based on workload posture, geographic context, or time of day. Aembit enforces these at the moment of access.
– Secrets Manager requires application code to call the retrieval API and handle the response. Aembit’s injection model requires no code changes: the application receives credentials transparently without any SDK or retrieval logic.
– Audit logs from Secrets Manager record API calls but do not attest which workload made the request at a cryptographic level. Aembit’s attestation-based logs provide the workload identity evidence that SOC 2 and NIST SP 800-207 require.
Aembit integrates with AWS Secrets Manager as a credential provider. Organizations that already have Secrets Manager deployed get:
– Governed access to Secrets Manager. Aembit attests the requesting workload’s identity before issuing credentials that allow Secrets Manager retrieval, so access is gated by cryptographic workload attestation rather than a stored AWS credential.
– Conditional enforcement. Aembit’s access policies can restrict which workloads can retrieve which secrets, under what posture conditions, and within what time windows.
– A unified audit trail. Aembit logs which attested workload retrieved Secrets Manager credentials, when, and under what policy, providing the workload-level attribution that Secrets Manager’s CloudTrail logs alone do not supply.
– Preservation of existing integrations. Teams can govern new workloads through Aembit while AWS-native Secrets Manager integrations (RDS credential rotation, Lambda environment variable injection) continue running unchanged.
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