Code RoomShared secret rotation
HardPrep Room Coding #2513

Shared secret rotation

On-callSecuritySenior–Staff~45 min

A departing employee's laptop is found to have had a clear-text copy of a shared database master password and a single Stripe restricted API key that 40+ microservices all use (it was hard-coded in a base config). The employee left under contested circumstances 9 days ago; access logs are inconclusive. You must rotate both secrets, but the Stripe key is used by services across 6 teams with no central secret store, and the DB password is referenced in ~30 deploy manifests. How do you triage the blast radius and roll the rotation without a self-inflicted outage?

What a strong answer looks like

Stop the bleeding first (mitigate), then form hypotheses from real signals. Separate root cause from symptom, communicate status as you go, and close with what prevents a repeat.

0:00 of about 45 min
Which questions mattered is sealed until you submit. Telling you now would just be handing over the edge cases.