bcquality/microsoft/knowledge/security/never-hardcode-secrets-in-al.md
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bc-version domain keywords technologies countries application-area
all
security
secrets
credentials
hardcoded
label
apikey
al
w1
all

Never hardcode secrets in AL

Contributions welcome — open a PR to refine or extend this article.

Description

A secret embedded in AL source — API key, password, connection string, token — lives forever: in the app package, in source control history, in every debugger session that sees the assignment, and in any log that captures the containing variable. Rotation is effectively impossible without a new release, and the blast radius covers every tenant the extension is installed in.

Best Practice

Retrieve secrets at runtime from a protected store: Azure Key Vault for production workloads (see prefer-azure-key-vault-for-production-secrets) or IsolatedStorage for tenant-local encrypted values (see use-isolated-storage-for-module-and-company-secrets). Carry the retrieved value in a SecretText variable end-to-end (see use-secrettext-for-credentials).

See sample: never-hardcode-secrets-in-al.good.al.

Anti Pattern

Assigning a secret literal to a Text, Code, or Label variable (including labels marked as constants). The secret is now part of the compiled app and indistinguishable from non-sensitive content to callers and tools.

See sample: never-hardcode-secrets-in-al.bad.al.