Secrets & Credential Hygiene

AI systems depend on a wide range of secrets, credentials, tokens, encryption keys, and privileged accounts to access data, models, APIs, cloud services, and infrastructure resources. Weak secret management practices can expose organizations to unauthorized access, data breaches, model theft, and operational disruption. This lesson explores secrets and credential hygiene within AI environments, examining secret lifecycle management, vault technologies, key management systems, hardware security modules, least-privilege access controls, credential scanning, and governance oversight practices. Understanding secrets management is essential for AI governance auditors because compromised credentials remain one of the most common causes of security incidents across modern AI ecosystems.