Issue with CI and protected branches

Hello Community!.
We are having a weird issue with the CI and the protected branches of all our projects.
We are passing critical and important values to the pipelines in the form of protected file variables (like credentials), the thing is when the branch we are working on is protected, we are getting authentication issues when we pass the credentials to the pipeline and we try to access a kubernetes cluster in aws. But if we unprotect the branch, the pipeline works just fine.
I’m wondering if there is any kind of restrictions when the branches are protected.
We are using gitlab.com runners.

Thanks in advance!

I’ve never used gitlab.com CI, so I don’t know this for sure, but I would assume that their runners are restricted from running on protected branches. You should just setup a few of your own runners

Hi!, thanks for your reply.
gitlab.com runners do run in protected runners, the issue seems to be with the global variables and the protected branches, it’s really weird.