Kubernetes Secrets Distribute Credentials but Do Not Provide Key Custody
A Kubernetes Secret is well suited to delivering sensitive configuration to workloads, but it is not designed to answer security questions such as identity, authorization, or key custody. Problems arise when one Secret ends up representing identity, enrollment state, rotation, and tenant context all at once, making failures hard to diagnose. The article argues for separating distribution, private-key custody, workload identity, and authorization, so that a private key is never exported to the caller. It also describes a candidate enrollment contract that requires enrolled workload credentials to live in encrypted, CRD-backed custody with a non-exporting signing interface, while forbidding Secret volumes and similar injection methods. The author notes that this contract is not yet qualified and that migration work remains open.
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