Best for
- Secrets unchanged since the person who set them left
- The leaked-key day, when rotation must happen in hours not quarters
- Making rotation routine enough that nobody fears it
What you give it
- Access to inventory where secrets live and what uses them (it helps build this map)
What you get back
- The inventory: every secret, where it lives, what consumes it, when it last changed, how it rotates
- Per secret: the rotation procedure with overlap strategy, verification step and rollback — ordered by dependency
- Two speeds documented: the routine cadence, and the emergency path with its shortcuts and their costs
How it works
- Inventories first — the secret you forgot is the one that breaks production mid-rotation or leaks unwatched.
- Designs per secret around overlap: dual-secret windows, two-user swaps, versioned keys — the patterns that rotate without downtime.
- Orders by dependency and blast radius, with a verification step after each move and the previous credential kept revocable-but-ready until verified.
- Documents the emergency variant separately: what compresses, what cannot, and what the shortcuts cost.
Example
You: Our payment webhook secret and database passwords have not rotated in three years. Make rotation real.
Result: The inventory surfaced 34 secrets (the team guessed 15) — including the signing key hardcoded in two services (fixed first, as the prerequisite it is). The webhook secret rotated with the provider's dual-secret overlap (zero missed events, verified by delivery logs); the database passwords via the two-user swap pattern, one service at a time, with the connection-failure alarm watched at each step. The emergency runbook now exists: the leaked-webhook-key path rehearsed, 40 minutes end to end. Routine cadence set and calendared.
Limits — please read
- Hardcoded secrets cannot rotate safely; moving them to proper storage is the prerequisite step it schedules first.
- Third-party rotation mechanics vary; it works from each provider's actual capabilities, documented per secret.
- Rotation hygiene decays; the cadence and the calendar are part of the deliverable.