How to securely store sensitive data like passwords in an ASP.NET Core application

Hi,

I wonder how to properly handle passwords using ASP.NET Core MVC in production and I can't find any solution for this topic. I need to access an API and therefore have to store AD service account credentials somewhere. Using environment variables doesn't seem to be the right way, since it's not very secure. Plain text passwords in a json file don't add any security either. In ASP.NET MVC 5, I stored such data as an encrypted entry in web.config file using key containers.

So what's the best (=safest) way to do this in ASP.NET Core?

Regards,

Jonas