Compliance and Audit Requirements

Compliance and Audit Requirements

Secret management in IaC must satisfy various compliance requirements from frameworks like PCI-DSS, HIPAA, and SOC 2. These standards mandate encryption at rest and in transit, access logging, and regular rotation. IaC implementations must demonstrate compliance through automated controls and comprehensive audit trails.

Audit logging captures every secret access, modification, and rotation event. These logs must include who accessed secrets, when access occurred, and from where. Correlation with IaC deployment logs provides complete visibility into secret usage during infrastructure provisioning. Immutable audit logs prevent tampering and support forensic investigations.

Access policies implement least-privilege principles and separation of duties. Development teams might encrypt secrets but lack decryption access. Production deployment systems can decrypt but not modify secrets. Security teams can audit all access without seeing secret values. This separation ensures no single entity has complete secret access.