What is the MOST secure way to store and access the database credentials?
Create an IAM role that has permissions to access the database. Attach the role to the EC2 instance.
Use AWS Secrets Manager to store the credentials. Retrieve the credentials from Secrets Manager as needed.
Store the credentials in an encrypted text file in an Amazon S3 bucket. Configure the EC2 instance’s user data to download the credentials from Amazon S3 as the instance boots.
Store the user name and password credentials directly in the source code. No further action is needed because the source code is stored in a private repository.
Explanations:
IAM roles are used to grant permissions to AWS services but cannot be used to authenticate to an Amazon RDS SQL Server database, which requires credentials.
AWS Secrets Manager is designed to store and manage sensitive information like database credentials securely. It can also automatically rotate credentials.
Storing credentials in an S3 bucket, even with encryption, is not as secure as using Secrets Manager. Additionally, manual retrieval poses a risk.
Storing credentials directly in the source code is a bad practice and exposes them to potential leaks or unauthorized access.
If I’m not mistaken, the answer is:
Use AWS Secrets Manager to store the credentials. Retrieve the credentials from Secrets Manager as needed.