Secrets That Survive RCE: Keeping Credentials Safe When Your Code Is Compromised

This addresses a critical vulnerability in Node.js deployments: RCE exploits that dump process.env expose all secrets at once. By storing only ciphertext in .env and decrypting on-demand through AWS KMS, the blast radius shrinks dramatically—attackers only access the specific secrets your code touched, not your entire vault. This matters because KMS gates access via IAM, eliminating the need for developers to ever handle plaintext keys.