Hashicorp Vault is a tool for securely storing and accessing secrets such as passwords, tokens and etc. It provides a central place to manage and control access to sensitive data, making it easier to secure applications. In other words, It provides a way of managing and storing credentials which are to authenticate or authorize users. In this blogpost we will take a look at the abstract of this tool.
note: *WIL is the personal notes I took as a result of my research and that I want to share. For more detailed information, you should visit Hashicorp Vault’s own site.
I will explain and show some examples in three parts about Hashicorp Vault.
1. General explanation about Hashicorp Vault (this blog)
2. General Secret Storage (with example code)
3. Short-term access to Google Cloud Secret Engine
I discovered Vault with the need that we had to power on and off AWS, Azure and GCP virtual machines. Credential information of the accounts was needed for the on-off process. We encrypted this information with traditional methods and saved it in the database. However, as this account information is very critical, encryption was not enough. We started researching to complete the transaction using a sorth-term access token, which is the safer method, and we came across the Hashicorp Vault.
Vault also has built-in support for a variety of secret backends, including generic key-value stores, databases, and cloud providers as AWS, Azure and GCP. Some organization also use it for tasks such as user password storage, emplooyee credentials storage, API key generation for scripts and services that communicate with each other also need to be authenticated and etc.
Overall, Hashicorp Vault is a valuable tool for any organization looking to improve the security of their secrets and manage access to sensitive data. It’s easy to use and integrates seamlessly with a wide range of systems, making it a powerful and flexible solution for secrets management.
It’s a very theoretical introduction, but I hope I’ve answered the questions about what it should be used for and where it should be used. In the next blog we’ll look at how a password or string that needs to be encrypted is kept in the hashicorp vault database.
*WIL: what I learned
