id	summary	reporter	owner	description	type	status	component	version	severity	resolution	keywords	cc	stage	has_patch	needs_docs	needs_tests	needs_better_patch	easy	ui_ux
22310	Document exact usage of and consequences of rotating SECRET_KEY	Sasha Romijn	Sasha Romijn	"Occasionally, people have accidents with their secret keys. It is somehow leaked, or they discover that they haven't stored it as securely as they should have. The trivial fix is to rotate your secret key. However, the secret key is used in various places, and this may invalidate existing tokens, sessions, etc. For example, if I remember correctly, secret keys form part of signed cookies and password reset tokens - but not password hashes.

We should document where exactly secret keys are being used, and therefore which data will be invalidated as soon as you rotate your secret key. This helps people understand what's going to happen, and will make sure nobody keeps an unsafe secret key because they are afraid of rotating it.

This requires some digging: there are of course many direct references to settings.SECRET_KEY, but also some more generic utilities, like cookie signing, that use the secret key, but that various other parts of Django then depend upon."	Cleanup/optimization	closed	Documentation	dev	Normal	fixed			Ready for checkin	1	0	0	0	0	0