https://DevOpsCloud.io -- Cloud Monk Losang Jinpa, Ph.D., MCSE/MCT, GitOps DevOps Engineer

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Return to Configuration secrets, Secrets management, Secrets vaults, Vault, Azure Vault, AWS Vault, GCP Vault

HashiCorp Vault, introduced by HashiCorp in April 2015, is a tool designed for securing, storing, and tightly controlling access to tokens, passwords, certificates, API keys, and other secrets in modern computing. Vault addresses the challenges of security within complex computing environments, providing a reliable and secure mechanism to manage sensitive data across diverse infrastructures—from on-premise to cloud environments. Its introduction marked a significant advancement in the field of information security, offering a solution to the increasingly sophisticated demands for data protection and access control in multi-cloud and hybrid environments.

At the heart of Vault's design is its ability to manage secrets and protect sensitive data through encryption. Vault enables fine-grained access control, allowing administrators to define precisely who can access what secrets, under which conditions. This capability is complemented by its dynamic secrets feature, which generates short-lived, on-demand access credentials, reducing the risks associated with long-term or static credentials. Additionally, Vault can encrypt and decrypt data without storing it, thereby providing security for data in transit and at rest, and supporting compliance with various regulatory requirements.

HashiCorp Vault's secret management system is one of its most compelling features. It allows for the secure storage of static secrets—like strings or passwords—as well as the dynamic generation of secrets for accessing other services such as databases, APIs, or cloud platforms. This dynamic generation of secrets ensures that each instance or service has a unique set of credentials, minimizing the blast radius of any potential unauthorized access and enhancing overall system security.

Vault supports a wide array of authentication methods, including tokens, username/password, multi-factor authentication, and cloud identity services, allowing for the integration of existing identity management systems. It also provides a detailed policy engine, enabling administrators to configure, with fine granularity, who can access specific secrets and under what conditions. This policy engine supports ACL (Access Control Lists) policies, which are crucial for creating a secure environment where access privileges are clearly defined and enforced.

The architecture of HashiCorp Vault is designed with high availability and scalability in mind. It can be deployed in a clustered environment, ensuring that the Vault service remains available even in the case of individual server failures. This resilience is critical for enterprise environments where the availability of secrets and credentials is crucial for the continuous operation of applications and services. Vault's modular architecture also allows it to integrate smoothly with a wide range of cloud providers and technologies, making it a versatile tool for managing secrets in any infrastructure.

Since its launch, HashiCorp Vault has continuously evolved, adding new features and integrations to adapt to the changing landscape of cloud computing and information security. Its community and ecosystem have grown, with many contributors adding plugins, integrations, and enhancements that extend its functionality to meet a wide range of use cases. As enterprises increasingly adopt cloud-native technologies and practices, Vault's role in securing sensitive data and enabling secure access control continues to be of paramount importance. The ongoing development of Vault promises to further its capabilities in addressing the complex security challenges of modern IT environments.

“A DevOps tool for secrets management, encryption as a service, and privileged access management.”

“Vault is a tool for securely accessing secrets. A secret is anything that you want to tightly control access to, such as API keys, passwords, certificates, and more. Vault provides a unified interface to any secret, while providing tight access control and recording a detailed audit log.

A modern system requires access to a multitude of secrets: database credentials, API keys for external services, credentials for service-oriented architecture communication, etc. Understanding who is accessing what secrets is already very difficult and platform-specific. Adding on key rolling, secure storage, and detailed audit logs is almost impossible without a custom solution. This is where Vault steps in.

• Secure Secret Storage: Arbitrary key/value secrets can be stored in Vault. Vault encrypts these secrets prior to writing them to persistent storage, so gaining access to the raw storage isn't enough to access your secrets. Vault can write to disk, Consul, and more.

• Dynamic Secrets: Vault can generate secrets on-demand for some systems, such as AWS or SQL databases. For example, when an application needs to access an S3 bucket, it asks Vault for S3 credentials, and Vault will generate an AWS keypair with valid permissions on demand. After creating these dynamic secrets, Vault will also automatically revoke them after the lease is up.

• Data Encryption: Vault can encrypt and decrypt data without storing it. This allows security teams to define encryption parameters and developers to store encrypted data in a location such as SQL without having to design their own encryption methods.

• Leasing and Renewal: All secrets in Vault have a lease associated with it. At the end of the lease, Vault will automatically revoke that secret. Clients are able to renew leases via built-in renew APIs.

• Revocation: Vault has built-in support for secret revocation. Vault can revoke not only single secrets, but a tree of secrets, for example all secrets read by a specific user, or all secrets of a particular type. Revocation assists in key rolling as well as locking down systems in the case of an intrusion.”

For more information, see the introduction section of the Vault website: https://vaultproject.io/intro

Fair Use Source: https://github.com/hashicorp/vault

If you believe you have found a security issue in Vault, please responsibly disclose by contacting HashiCorp at security@hashicorp.com.

• https://github.com/hashicorp/vault
• https://vaultproject.io
• IRC: #vault-tool on Freenode
• Announcement list: Google Groups: https://groups.google.com/group/hashicorp-announce
• Discussion list: Google Groups: https://groups.google.com/group/vault-tool