Secure property management should isolate development, test, staging, and production environments rather than allowing secrets from one environment to provide access to another. MuleSoft's Secure Configuration Properties model supports this by using environment-specific property files—for example dev.secure.yaml, sandbox.secure.yaml, and prod.secure.yaml—and resolving the appropriate file through an environment property.
Sensitive values such as passwords, API credentials, and private service configuration should therefore be environment-specific. Production credentials should not normally be reused in development or testing. The encryption key used to protect those values should likewise be independently managed rather than shared broadly across security boundaries. This limits the impact if a non-production key or properties file is exposed.
The Secure Properties Tool encrypts the sensitive values using a supplied key, while the Mule runtime receives the corresponding decryption key separately at deployment/runtime. MuleSoft also emphasizes protecting that key rather than embedding it directly in application configuration.
Accordingly, the Developer II security model represented by this question expects both different sensitive property values and different encryption keys across environments.
Reference topics: Secure Configuration Properties; environment-specific secure files; encryption keys; secret isolation; deployment security.
Official documentation: https://docs.mulesoft.com/anypoint-code-builder/int-create-secure-configs
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