RDS Master Password In Plaintext

What this rule checks

Detects RDS instances and clusters whose MasterUserPassword is a literal string in the template rather than a Secrets Manager/SSM dynamic reference or managed credential.

How to fix it

1. 1Use ManageMasterUserPassword (rds.Credentials.fromGeneratedSecret in CDK) so RDS manages and rotates the credential
2. 2Or reference an existing secret with a '{{resolve:secretsmanager:...}}' dynamic reference
3. 3Rotate any credential that has already been committed in plaintext

import * as rds from 'aws-cdk-lib/aws-rds';

new rds.CfnDBInstance(this, 'Db', {
  dbInstanceClass: 'db.t3.micro',
  engine: 'postgres',
  allocatedStorage: '20',
  masterUsername: 'admin',
  masterUserPassword: 'SuperSecretPassw0rd!',
});

import * as rds from 'aws-cdk-lib/aws-rds';

new rds.CfnDBInstance(this, 'Db', {
  dbInstanceClass: 'db.t3.micro',
  engine: 'postgres',
  allocatedStorage: '20',
  masterUsername: 'admin',
  manageMasterUserPassword: true,
});

CDK Insights pinpoints the exact file and line in your CDK source for every finding, so you can jump straight to the fix.

Affected resource types

Intentional? Suppress this finding

Sometimes a flag is deliberate — a genuinely public endpoint, say. You can dismiss rds-master-password-plaintext and the reason is kept in the report, not silently hidden.

In .cdk-insights.json:

{
  "ignoreRules": [
    { "id": "rds-master-password-plaintext", "reason": "Why this is intentional" }
  ]
}

Or inline in your CDK code:

Validations.of(scope).acknowledge({
  id: 'cdk-insights::rds-master-password-plaintext',
  reason: 'Why this is intentional',
});

Use the rule ID rds-master-password-plaintext shown above — not the CDK-* ID from SARIF / GitHub code scanning. To dismiss every finding on one construct instead, use ignorePaths. Suppression docs →

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