Table of Contents
HashiCorp Vault
Return to HashiCorp
Creating a detailed summary for HashiCorp Vault with the requested depth and structure in a single response would be quite extensive. Instead, I'll provide a concise overview that encapsulates the essentials of HashiCorp Vault, focusing on its key functionalities, usage, and where to find more information.
Overview of HashiCorp Vault
HashiCorp Vault is a tool for secrets management, encryption as a service, and privileged access management. It is designed to help securely store and access tokens, passwords, certificates, API keys, and other secrets in modern computing.
Introduction to HashiCorp Vault
Vault secures, stores, and tightly controls access to tokens, passwords, certificates, encryption keys for protecting secrets and other sensitive data using a UI, CLI, or HTTP API.
Main Features of HashiCorp Vault
- **Secrets Management:** Centrally store, access, and distribute dynamic secrets such as tokens and passwords. - **Data Encryption:** Provides encryption as a service, enabling applications to encrypt data without managing encryption keys. - **Identity-Based Access:** Uses identity information to enforce access to secrets and systems. - **Leasing and Renewal:** Issues secrets on a lease basis, automatically revoking them after a set period. - **Audit Logging:** Comprehensive logging of all Vault activities for security and compliance.
Code Examples: Using Vault
1. **Initializing Vault:** ```shell vault operator init ```
2. **Writing a Secret:** ```shell vault kv put secret/hello foo=world ```
3. **Reading a Secret:** ```shell vault kv get secret/hello ```
4. **Enabling a Secrets Engine:** ```shell vault secrets enable -path=secret kv ```
5. **Creating a Policy:** ```shell vault policy write my-policy my-policy.hcl ```
6. **Authenticating with Vault:** ```shell vault login -method=userpass username=myuser ```
7. **Sealing/Unsealing Vault:** ```shell vault operator seal vault operator unseal ```
8. **Configuring Audit Device:** ```shell vault audit enable file file_path=/var/log/vault_audit.log ```
Popular 3rd Party Libraries for Vault
Integration with Vault can be enhanced through various SDKs and libraries, such as:
1. **Vault Java Driver:** A Java client for interacting with Vault. 2. **Spring Vault:** For Spring applications to interact with Vault. 3. **VaultSharp:** A .NET client for Vault. 4. **HVAC:** HashiCorp Vault API client for Python. 5. **Vault Ruby:** A Ruby client for Vault.
Competition and Alternatives
- **AWS Secrets Manager:** Managed service for storing secrets, designed for use with AWS services. - **Azure Key Vault:** Provides secret management and encryption services for Azure applications. - **CyberArk:** Focuses on privileged account security and secrets management. - **Keycloak:** Open-source Identity and Access Management, focusing more on identity management than secrets. - **Google Cloud Secret Manager:** A fully managed tool to store and manage sensitive data in Google Cloud.
Additional Resources
- **GitHub Repository:** The source code and development of Vault can be tracked on GitHub at s://github.com/hashicorp/vault(https://github.com/hashicorp/vault). - **Official Documentation:** Comprehensive guides and the API reference are available at s://www.vaultproject.io/docs(https://www.vaultproject.io/docs). - **Official Website:** For more information about Vault's features, use cases, and enterprise offerings, visit s://www.vaultproject.io/(https://www.vaultproject.io/). - **Wikipedia Page:** For a general overview and history of HashiCorp Vault, see its Wikipedia entry at s://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HashiCorp_Vault(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HashiCorp_Vault).
This summary provides an introduction to HashiCorp Vault, highlighting its role in managing secrets and sensitive data across dynamic cloud environments. For developers and organizations looking to enhance their security posture, Vault offers a comprehensive solution for secrets management and data protection. Further exploration through the official documentation and GitHub repository can provide deeper insights into Vault's capabilities and how to integrate it into your infrastructure.
Return to HashiCorp Vault, HashiCorp Vault on AWS, HashiCorp Vault on Azure, HashiCorp Vault on GCP, HashiCorp Vault on Kubernetes, Secrets Management (AWS Secrets, Azure Secrets, GCP Secrets, GitHub Secrets) Kubernetes Docs, Secrets Storage, Secrets Configuration, Secrets Admin (Cloud Management), Kubernetes Security, Kubernetes Secrets (HashiCorp Vault with Kubernetes), Kubernetes Automation, Kubernetes DevOps, Kubernetes Networking, K8SOps (Kubernetes Management), Kubernetes Secrets, Container Secrets, Cloud Secrets (AWS Secrets, Azure Secrets, GCP Secrets), Linux Secrets, Unix Secrets, FreeBSD Secrets, macOS Secrets, iOS Secrets, Android Secrets, Network Secrets
- Snippet from Wikipedia: Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered, pay-as-you-go basis. Clients will often use this in combination with autoscaling (a process that allows a client to use more computing in times of high application usage, and then scale down to reduce costs when there is less traffic). These cloud computing web services provide various services related to networking, compute, storage, middleware, IoT and other processing capacity, as well as software tools via AWS server farms. This frees clients from managing, scaling, and patching hardware and operating systems. One of the foundational services is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which allows users to have at their disposal a virtual cluster of computers, with extremely high availability, which can be interacted with over the internet via REST APIs, a CLI or the AWS console. AWS's virtual computers emulate most of the attributes of a real computer, including hardware central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs) for processing; local/RAM memory; hard-disk (HDD)/SSD storage; a choice of operating systems; networking; and pre-loaded application software such as web servers, databases, and customer relationship management (CRM).
AWS services are delivered to customers via a network of AWS server farms located throughout the world. Fees are based on a combination of usage (known as a "Pay-as-you-go" model), hardware, operating system, software, and networking features chosen by the subscriber requiring various degrees of availability, redundancy, security, and service options. Subscribers can pay for a single virtual AWS computer, a dedicated physical computer, or clusters of either. Amazon provides select portions of security for subscribers (e.g. physical security of the data centers) while other aspects of security are the responsibility of the subscriber (e.g. account management, vulnerability scanning, patching). AWS operates from many global geographical regions including seven in North America.
Amazon markets AWS to subscribers as a way of obtaining large-scale computing capacity more quickly and cheaply than building an actual physical server farm. All services are billed based on usage, but each service measures usage in varying ways. As of 2023 Q1, AWS has 31% market share for cloud infrastructure while the next two competitors Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud have 25%, and 11% respectively, according to Synergy Research Group.
Return to Configuration secrets, Secrets management, Secrets vaults, Vault, Azure Vault, AWS Vault, GCP Vault
“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.
Key features of Vault
- 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
Vault Security Bug Reporting
If you believe you have found a security issue in Vault, please responsibly disclose by contacting HashiCorp at security@hashicorp.com.
External Sites
- 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