Native Support for Dynamic Credential Retrieval from External Secrets Vaults in IBM CDC Replication Engines

Problem Statement

Many enterprises — particularly in regulated industries such as banking, financial services, and healthcare — are required by corporate security governance and compliance frameworks to enforce mandatory, scheduled password rotation for all database and service credentials. This rotation is typically managed through enterprise-grade secrets management platforms such as HashiCorp Vault, CyberArk, or IBM Secrets Manager.

IBM CDC (IIDR) Replication Engines currently require static credentials to be configured at setup time for source and target database connections. While it is technically possible to configure CDC to retrieve credentials from a vault during initial setup, there is no mechanism to handle credential expiry or rotation after the engine is already running. When the vault rotates a password, CDC loses database connectivity immediately. Recovery requires manual intervention: the new credentials must be reconfigured in the engine, and the engine must be restarted.

This creates a critical operational gap — the very security policy that vault rotation is meant to enforce becomes a source of unplanned replication downtime.

In large-scale financial services environments processing millions of daily transactions, an unplanned replication outage caused by a credential rotation event can have direct regulatory and business continuity implications, including exposure to SLA breaches, audit findings, and data consistency risks across downstream systems.

Proposed Enhancement

IBM CDC Replication Engines should implement a native mechanism for dynamic credential retrieval from external secrets management vaults, enabling seamless handling of password rotation without requiring engine restarts or manual reconfiguration.

Detailed Requirements

·                Pluggable credential provider interface capable of integrating with major secrets management platforms, including HashiCorp Vault, CyberArk, and IBM Secrets Manager.

·                Flexible authentication support — token-based, AppRole, or certificate-based authentication to the vault at engine startup and upon credential expiry.

·                Automatic in-flight credential refresh: when a database connection fails due to an expired or rotated credential, the engine should transparently retrieve the latest secret from the vault and re-establish the connection without interrupting the replication pipeline.

·                Configurable parameters to define vault endpoint, secret path, authentication method, refresh interval, and retry policy.

·                Audit logging of all credential retrieval and refresh events for compliance traceability.

Key Benefits

·                Seamless integration with enterprise mandatory password rotation policies

• Elimination of unplanned replication downtime caused by credential expiry
• Reduction of operational overhead — no manual intervention required on each rotation cycle
• Alignment with zero-trust security models and compliance frameworks (SOC 2, PCI-DSS, ISO 27001)
• Improved resilience and availability of replication pipelines in production environments
• Removal of the conflict between security compliance and replication continuity in regulated industries