Securing AI APIs with Secret Manager
PythonSecuring AI APIs often involves securing sensitive information such as API keys, access tokens, or credentials, which should be kept outside of the source code and safely stored. Secret Management services help store and manage such sensitive information. You can use Pulumi to provision and manage secrets using cloud providers' Secret Manager services.
For instance, if you're using AWS, you would use AWS Secrets Manager, and if you're on GCP, you would use Google Cloud Secret Manager. Let's say you want to secure an API key for an AI service. Below is an example of how to do this using AWS Secrets Manager with Pulumi in Python.
AWS Secrets Manager with Pulumi
We'll define an AWS Secret by using the
aws.secretsmanager.Secret
class from the Pulumi AWS provider, which allows us to create a new secret. Then we'll create a version of that secret using theaws.secretsmanager.SecretVersion
class, which allows us to set the actual secret value. The secret's ARN (Amazon Resource Name) can be used to reference this secret in other AWS services securely without exposing the actual secret value.Here's a Pulumi program in Python that sets up a secret in AWS Secrets Manager:
import pulumi import pulumi_aws as aws # Create an AWS Secret to store the API key api_secret = aws.secretsmanager.Secret("aiApiSecret", description="AI API secret key", tags={ "Environment": "Production", "ManagedBy": "Pulumi", }) # Create a version of the secret with the actual API key api_secret_version = aws.secretsmanager.SecretVersion("apiSecretVersion", secret_id=api_secret.id, secret_string="<YOUR_AI_API_SECRET_KEY>") # Export the secret's ARN so we can use it in our applications pulumi.export("api_secret_arn", api_secret.arn)
Replace
<YOUR_AI_API_SECRET_KEY>
with your actual API secret key string. In a real-world scenario, you should not hard-code this value; instead, it could be sourced from a Pulumi configuration or environment variable for better security practices.The
pulumi.export
statement at the bottom makes the ARN of the secret available as an output of our Pulumi stack. This is useful when you need the ARN to configure other services that will use this secret.Using the Secret in Your Application
With the ARN exported, you can reference this secret in your application code by fetching it on runtime using AWS SDKs for your preferred language and never including the actual secret in your code.
Conclusion and Next Steps
This program is a basic example of how to use Pulumi to manage secrets. In practice, you can dynamically configure secrets using environment variables, Pulumi config, CI/CD systems, or any other secure inputs according to your operations workflows.
Pulumi also supports setting IAM policies to restrict which roles or users can access this secret's value, providing fine-grained access control.
After defining your secrets with Pulumi, you could proceed to set up the rest of your infrastructure, including your AI APIs, and ensure they are configured to use the secrets for any sensitive operations.