What is Credential Management?
Credential management is the set of policies, processes, and tools used to securely handle the full lifecycle of access credentials — including creation, secure storage, controlled sharing, regular rotation, and timely revocation.
Credentials encompass a wide range of authentication and authorization artifacts: passwords, API keys, SSH keys, OAuth tokens, certificates, database connection strings, and more. Each represents a door into a system, and managing them poorly is one of the most common causes of security breaches.
Effective credential management addresses several concerns. Credentials should be generated with sufficient randomness and complexity. They should be stored in encrypted form, never in plaintext files or source code. Sharing should happen through secure channels with access logging. Rotation policies should ensure that compromised or stale credentials are replaced regularly. Revocation should be prompt when access is no longer needed.
Organizations typically use a combination of tools for credential management: password managers for personal credentials, secrets managers (like HashiCorp Vault or AWS Secrets Manager) for application credentials, and secure sharing tools for one-off credential handoffs between people. The gap that often remains is the ad-hoc sharing scenario — getting a credential from one person to another quickly and securely.
How Vaulted uses Credential Management
Vaulted fills a specific gap in credential management: the secure one-off handoff. When you need to share a credential with a colleague, contractor, or client and cannot use a shared secrets manager, Vaulted provides encrypted, self-destructing delivery. It complements rather than replaces long-term credential management tools — handling the "how do I get this credential to that person right now" problem without leaving the credential in a Slack message or email thread.