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](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1078/004) 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.(Citation: Permiso Scattered Spider 2023)(Citation: Sysdig ScarletEel 2.0 2023)(Citation: AWS Secrets Manager)(Citation: Google Cloud Secrets)(Citation: Microsoft Azure Key Vault)

**Note:** this technique is distinct from [Cloud Instance Metadata API](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1552/005) in that the credentials are being directly requested from the cloud secrets manager, rather than through the medium of the instance metadata API.
Cloud Secrets Management Stores
source_name: mitre-attack  url: https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1555/006  external_id: T1555.006     source_name: Sysdig ScarletEel 2.0 2023  description: Alessandro Brucato. (2023, July 11). SCARLETEEL 2.0: Fargate, Kubernetes, and Crypto. Retrieved September 25, 2023.  url: https://sysdig.com/blog/scarleteel-2-0/     source_name: AWS Secrets Manager  description: AWS. (n.d.). Retrieve secrets from AWS Secrets Manager. Retrieved September 25, 2023.  url: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/secretsmanager/latest/userguide/retrieving-secrets.html     source_name: Google Cloud Secrets  description: Google Cloud. (n.d.). List secrets and view secret details. Retrieved September 25, 2023.  url: https://cloud.google.com/secret-manager/docs/view-secret-details     source_name: Permiso Scattered Spider 2023  description: Ian Ahl. (2023, September 20). LUCR-3: SCATTERED SPIDER GETTING SAAS-Y IN THE CLOUD. Retrieved September 25, 2023.  url: https://permiso.io/blog/lucr-3-scattered-spider-getting-saas-y-in-the-cloud     source_name: Microsoft Azure Key Vault  description: Microsoft. (2023, January 13). Quickstart: Set and retrieve a secret from Azure Key Vault using Azure CLI. Retrieved September 25, 2023.  url: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/key-vault/secrets/quick-create-cli     