When deploying an Aspire cluster in a production environment, resource allocation and security settings becomes very important, as these environments should be configured to be as stable and secure as possible.
Aspire stores sensitive configuration such as credentials encrypted with AES-256 algorithm. For that it uses an encryption key located in a file accessible by the Aspire process. If such a key is not configured, a constant default key will be used to encrypt and decrypt.
Using the default key is not secure!, as anything encrypted with it can be decrypted in any other Aspire deployment using the default key.
It is strongly recommended to create a random 256 bit key file (32 bytes) and configure it as the encryption key for all Aspire nodes in the same cluster. See Encryption properties for details on setting it.