API Credential Rotation

API credential rotation

Integration credentials are long-lived, broadly scoped, and shared between systems, which makes them the most commonly leaked secret and the most disruptive to rotate if rotation was never designed.

Method

1. Scope every credential to the minimum. Read-only where possible and per-integration rather than one key used everywhere (see authz-design).
2. Store in a secret manager, never in code or config files. Both end up in version control and in logs (see secrets-management).
3. Support two valid credentials at once. Overlapping validity is what makes rotation possible without downtime, and it must be designed rather than improvised.
4. Rotate on a schedule and on suspicion. Routine rotation proves the process works before an incident requires it under pressure.
5. Separate credentials per environment. A test key with production access is a production incident waiting for a mistake.
6. Alert on credential expiry ahead of time. Expired integration credentials are a common and entirely preventable outage (see tls-and-certificates).
7. Know the revocation path before you need it. How fast you can invalidate a leaked key determines the damage window (see secret-scanning).

Boundaries

Rotation limits exposure duration; it does not detect misuse, which needs monitoring. Some providers do not support overlapping credentials, forcing a brief outage. Credentials held by a vendor on your behalf are outside your rotation control (see vendor-data-processing).