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T1555.006 Cloud Secrets Management Stores

Adversaries may acquire credentials from cloud-native secret management solutions such as AWS Secrets Manager, GCP Secret Manager, Azure Key Vault, and Terraform Vault.

Secrets managers support the secure centralized management of passwords, API keys, and other credential material. Where secrets managers are in use, cloud services can dynamically acquire credentials via API requests rather than accessing secrets insecurely stored in plain text files or environment variables.

If an adversary is able to gain sufficient privileges in a cloud environment – for example, by obtaining the credentials of high-privileged Cloud Accounts or compromising a service that has permission to retrieve secrets – they may be able to request secrets from the secrets manager. This can be accomplished via commands such as get-secret-value in AWS, gcloud secrets describe in GCP, and az key vault secret show in Azure.41235

Note: this technique is distinct from Cloud Instance Metadata API in that the credentials are being directly requested from the cloud secrets manager, rather than through the medium of the instance metadata API.

Item Value
ID T1555.006
Sub-techniques T1555.001, T1555.002, T1555.003, T1555.004, T1555.005, T1555.006
Tactics TA0006
Platforms IaaS
Version 1.0
Created 25 September 2023
Last Modified 15 April 2025

Procedure Examples

ID Name Description
G0125 HAFNIUM HAFNIUM has moved laterally from on-premises environments to steal passwords from Azure key vaults.7
S1091 Pacu Pacu can retrieve secrets from the AWS Secrets Manager via the enum_secrets module.6
G1053 Storm-0501 Storm-0501 has utilized Azure Key Vault to store the encryption key using the operation Microsoft.KeyVault/Vaults/write.8

Mitigations

ID Mitigation Description
M1026 Privileged Account Management Limit the number of cloud accounts and services with permission to query the secrets manager to only those required. Ensure that accounts and services with permissions to query the secrets manager only have access to the secrets they require.

References

  1. Alessandro Brucato. (2023, July 11). SCARLETEEL 2.0: Fargate, Kubernetes, and Crypto. Retrieved September 25, 2023. ↩

  2. AWS. (n.d.). Retrieve secrets from AWS Secrets Manager. Retrieved September 25, 2023. ↩

  3. Google Cloud. (n.d.). List secrets and view secret details. Retrieved September 25, 2023. ↩

  4. Ian Ahl. (2023, September 20). LUCR-3: SCATTERED SPIDER GETTING SAAS-Y IN THE CLOUD. Retrieved September 25, 2023. ↩

  5. Microsoft. (2023, January 13). Quickstart: Set and retrieve a secret from Azure Key Vault using Azure CLI. Retrieved September 25, 2023. ↩

  6. Rhino Security Labs. (2019, August 22). Pacu. Retrieved October 17, 2019. ↩

  7. Microsoft Threat Intelligence . (2025, March 5). Silk Typhoon targeting IT supply chain. Retrieved March 20, 2025. ↩

  8. Microsoft Threat Intelligence. (2025, August 27). Storm-0501’s evolving techniques lead to cloud-based ransomware. Retrieved October 19, 2025. ↩