Hashicorp's Vault makes it easy to apply the best practices of credential management, while also reducing the complexity of your DevOps infrastructure.
What's the problem?
Managing secrets and distributing credentials are hard to do in practice. Engineers often take shortcuts and jepordize security as a result. Businesses don't have insights into these vulnerabilities, but find out in forensic investigations after a successful attack.
Easier in the cloud, right?
With ephemeral resources in the cloud, maintaining security over credential management is more difficult. The nature of the cloud leaves us with more constraints and less wiggle room for leakage.
Why Vault?
Vault makes best practices for these workflows more accessible and reduces the complexity of your DevOps infrastructure.
Vault allows us to scale best-practices for handling secrets to the dynamic infrastructure of the cloud.
Interested in learning more about how Hashicorp's Vault can help your business succeed?
Set up an engineering consultation
How does Vault work?
Vault tightly controls access to secrets and encryption keys, validating client identity against trusted authentication backends. As a platform, Vault is modular and uses a plugin architecture.
Vault ships with numerous secret providers and authentication backends, making it extremely flexible and capable of integrating with a wide variety of existing systems.
Secret Engines
Vault provides support for a wide range of static and dynamic types of secrets. The engines store, generate or encrypt data. The secret engines integrate with 3rd party systems (such as Redis, Postgres, AWS, active directory, SSH, and more) to provide API tokens, generate credentials, and encrypt data.
These are plugins "mounted" in the system to be available through the Vault API, and which offer a specific set of actions on a type of secret.
Authentication Backends
Vault provides integration flexibility by supporting a wide range of backends that associate identity and policies to user requests.
Audit Devices
Vault keeps a detailed log of all operations on the Vault. These logs may be sent to one or more devices, including files, syslog, and raw TCP/UDP/UNIX sockets.
Vault's Use Cases
- Easily manage access to static secrets
- Generate secrets and credentials on the fly
- Grant temporary access to databases, cloud resources and APIs
- Give CI build jobs limited access to AWS and other cloud providers
- Generate TLS certs on the fly
- Data encryption as a service
- Offload data encryption from your app
- Provide data encryption to legacy apps
- Supports "break-glass" scenarios
- cutoff access to vault while you sort out an active security incident
Vault on our Blog
- Intro to Vault (coming soon)
- Vault 1.0 and Auto-Unseal (coming soon)
- Use Vault to get access to Postgres DB (coming soon)
- Secure CI jobs and their access to your Cloud Provider
- PKI: Generate TLS/SSL certs for HTTP web apps with Vault
- EC2 and Chicken-Egg Seed Tokens in Vault
- Securing App Credentials in High Risk Environments
- Retrofit Existing Applications with Strong Data Encryption
- Securing SSH and Lowering Overhead with Vault
- Using Vault as a shared password manager (Get rid of lastpass)
Uphill battle?
While revolutionary, Vault introduces fundamental changes to deployment systems and architecture. Vault has a learning curve.
Our strong focus on secure and dependable software at FP Complete makes Vault a natural fit, and we're proud to offer our services to improve and secure your application deployments with Hashicorp's Vault.