Secrets Management for OpenClaw — Vault, AWS, Doppler Integration

When to use a secrets manager: For teams, production deployments, multiple services, and environments where compliance (SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI) requires secret access auditing.

Why a Dedicated Secrets Manager?

Feature	Env Variables	.env Files	Secrets Manager
Access audit log	❌	❌	✅
Automatic rotation	❌	❌	✅
Fine-grained access control	❌	❌	✅
Centralized management	❌	❌	✅
No plaintext on disk	✅	❌	✅
Compliance support	Partial	❌	✅
Setup complexity	Simple	Simple	Moderate

HashiCorp Vault

Vault is the most popular open-source secrets manager and supports dynamic secrets, automatic rotation, and multiple auth methods:

Install and Configure Vault

# Install Vault
curl -fsSL https://apt.releases.hashicorp.com/gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/hashicorp-archive-keyring.gpg
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/hashicorp-archive-keyring.gpg] https://apt.releases.hashicorp.com $(lsb_release -cs) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hashicorp.list
sudo apt update && sudo apt install vault

# Start dev server (for testing only!)
vault server -dev

# Store OpenClaw secrets
export VAULT_ADDR="http://127.0.0.1:8200"
vault kv put secret/openclaw \
  openai_api_key="sk-proj-..." \
  anthropic_api_key="sk-ant-..."

Configure OpenClaw to Use Vault

# config.yaml
secrets:
  provider: vault
  vault:
    address: "https://vault.example.com:8200"
    auth_method: token           # token | kubernetes | approle | aws
    token: "${VAULT_TOKEN}"
    path: "secret/data/openclaw"
    field_map:
      OPENAI_API_KEY: "openai_api_key"
      ANTHROPIC_API_KEY: "anthropic_api_key"

Dynamic Secrets (Auto-Rotating)

# Vault can generate short-lived, auto-rotating credentials
# (for databases, cloud credentials — not AI API keys which don't support this)
vault write database/roles/openclaw \
  db_name=mydb \
  creation_statements="CREATE USER..." \
  default_ttl="1h" \
  max_ttl="24h"

AWS Secrets Manager

# Create secrets
aws secretsmanager create-secret \
  --name "openclaw/openai-api-key" \
  --description "OpenAI API key for OpenClaw agents" \
  --secret-string "sk-proj-..."

aws secretsmanager create-secret \
  --name "openclaw/anthropic-api-key" \
  --secret-string "sk-ant-..."

# config.yaml
secrets:
  provider: aws_secretsmanager
  aws:
    region: "us-east-1"
    secrets:
      OPENAI_API_KEY:
        secret_name: "openclaw/openai-api-key"
      ANTHROPIC_API_KEY:
        secret_name: "openclaw/anthropic-api-key"

Use an IAM role (not an IAM user) for EC2/ECS deployments to avoid managing static credentials:

// IAM policy to allow OpenClaw to read its secrets
{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [{
    "Effect": "Allow",
    "Action": ["secretsmanager:GetSecretValue"],
    "Resource": "arn:aws:secretsmanager:us-east-1:123456789:secret:openclaw/*"
  }]
}

Doppler

Doppler provides a simple SaaS secrets manager with a great developer experience:

# Install Doppler CLI
curl -Ls --tlsv1.2 --proto "=https" --retry 3 https://cli.doppler.com/install.sh | sh

# Login
doppler login

# Set up a project
doppler setup

# Inject secrets into OpenClaw
doppler run -- openclaw run "your task"

# In CI/CD
doppler run -- openclaw start --daemon

Azure Key Vault

# Create a Key Vault
az keyvault create \
  --name "openclaw-secrets" \
  --resource-group "my-rg" \
  --location "eastus"

# Store a secret
az keyvault secret set \
  --vault-name "openclaw-secrets" \
  --name "openai-api-key" \
  --value "sk-proj-..."

secrets:
  provider: azure_keyvault
  azure:
    vault_url: "https://openclaw-secrets.vault.azure.net/"
    # Uses DefaultAzureCredential (managed identity, env, CLI)
    secrets:
      OPENAI_API_KEY: "openai-api-key"
      ANTHROPIC_API_KEY: "anthropic-api-key"

Kubernetes Secrets + External Secrets Operator

# Install External Secrets Operator
helm repo add external-secrets https://charts.external-secrets.io
helm install external-secrets external-secrets/external-secrets -n external-secrets --create-namespace

# ExternalSecret resource
apiVersion: external-secrets.io/v1beta1
kind: ExternalSecret
metadata:
  name: openclaw-secrets
spec:
  refreshInterval: 1h
  secretStoreRef:
    name: vault-backend
    kind: SecretStore
  target:
    name: openclaw-secrets
  data:
    - secretKey: OPENAI_API_KEY
      remoteRef:
        key: secret/openclaw
        property: openai_api_key

Emergency Procedures (Leaked Secret Response)

Revoke immediately — go to the provider dashboard and revoke the compromised key
Generate new key — create a replacement key
Update secrets manager — update the stored secret
Deploy update — ensure all running agents pick up the new key
Review audit logs — check for unauthorized usage with the old key
Post-mortem — document how the key was exposed and prevent recurrence

What's Next

Security Overview — Back to the full security picture
API Key Best Practices — Key rotation and scoping
Docker Deployment — Inject secrets in containerized deployments

Secrets Management Patterns

The simplest safe pattern for small deployments is environment-variable injection from a secrets manager at container startup — the secret never exists on disk, only in memory for the lifetime of the process. This works well for up to a few dozen secrets. As the number of secrets grows or as you need fine-grained access control and audit logging of secret access, move to a dedicated secrets manager like Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, or Google Secret Manager. These services provide secret versioning, automatic rotation, access policies, and detailed access logs — capabilities that are impractical to replicate with environment variables alone.

For multi-agent deployments, use unique credentials per agent, not shared credentials. When you have ten agents sharing one API key, a compromise of any one agent exposes all of their operations. With per-agent credentials, you can immediately revoke access for the compromised agent, audit exactly what it accessed, and leave all other agents unaffected. The operational overhead of managing more credentials is justified by the security and incident response benefits.

Emergency revocation is a critical capability to plan for before you need it. Document the exact steps required to revoke each type of credential and how long it takes to take effect. Test the revocation process before an incident — discovering that key revocation takes twenty minutes to propagate across a CDN during an active incident is far more stressful than discovering it during a drill. A documented and tested revocation runbook is one of the highest-value security investments for an AI agent deployment.