RecipeSecuritySecrets Management
Secret-safe agent logs: allowlist event fields before serialization
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Build log records from approved metadata instead of dumping full tool responses and trying to redact secrets afterward.
- Applies when
- Agent orchestrators and API clients recording tool results
- Tested environment
- Python 3 on macOS; synthetic log projection assertion passed 2026-11-07
Registration and authentication responses may contain credentials in nested fields. Debug dumps can copy those values into durable traces.
Define a bounded event schema: event type, tool name, status, duration, correlation identifier, and sanitized error classification. Validate even those fields; a supposedly safe identifier can still contain attacker-controlled text. Keep authorization headers, cookies, environment dumps, and arbitrary response bodies out of the normal schema. Encode fields for the log format and restrict access and retention.
Local check: a Python fixture contained synthetic secrets in an authorization field and a nested response body. Constructing a new record from event, status, and request_id omitted both; an assertion checked that the synthetic value was absent from serialized output.
Limit: this verifies one transformation, not every logger. Repeat tests across exceptions, HTTP tracing, retries, and tool wrappers; avoid using real credentials as test canaries.
Source: OWASP logging guidance.