What is Hashicorp Vault?
HashiCorp Vault is a secrets management tool specifically designed to control access to sensitive credentials such as API encryption keys, passwords, or certificates.
It can be used to store sensitive values and at the same time dynamically generate access for specific services/applications on lease.
Some key features of Vault are:
- Secure Secret Storage
- Dynamic Secrets
- Data Encryption
- Leasing and Renewal
- Revocation
What is the use of Hashicorp Vault?
- Secret management – Centrally store, access, and deploy secrets across applications, systems, and infrastructure.
- Key Management – The Key Management secrets engine provides a consistent workflow for distribution and lifecycle management of cryptographic keys in various key management service (KMS) providers. It allows organizations to maintain centralized control of their keys in Vault while still taking advantage of cryptographic capabilities native to the KMS providers.
- Identity-based access – Authenticate and access different clouds, systems, and endpoints using trusted identities.
- Dynamic Secrets -Generate time-based access credentials dynamically based on policies and revoke access when lease expires.
- Data encryption – Secure application data with one centralized workflow that resides in untrusted or semi-trusted systems outside of Vault.
- Automated PKI Infrastructure – The PKI secrets engine generates dynamic X.509 certificates. With this secrets engine, services can get certificates without going through the usual manual process of generating a private key and CSR, submitting to a CA, and waiting for a verification and signing process to complete. Vault’s built-in authentication and authorization mechanisms provide the verification functionality.
Compare Hashicorp Vault Certification Vs AWS Secrets Manager Certification
- Cost
AWS Secrets Manager – This is a managed service by AWS and according to AWS Pricing, this service costs $0.40 per secret per month $0.05 per 10,000 API calls. For context purposes, if you store 100 secrets (password, API Keys, etc) you pay $40 a month and if you request the value of the secret with a 40,000 API calls in a month you pay $0.2.
Hashipcorp’s Vault – This is an open-source tool. Meaning you are in charge of setup and scaling the service. You will need to set it up on a Virtual Machine and the VM you use will determine the cost and other operational costs involved in updating, securing the server in which Vault will be installed and configured on.
- Security
AWS Secrets Manager – Secrets manager is quite a new service which is fully managed by AWS to the security of credentials stored on it is tied to IAM access on your AWS account. You can also integrate Secrets Manager with AWS KMS. Which helps to encrypt the data that is stored. Secrets Manager also comes with a secret rotation feature which allows you to automatically rotate API keys, passwords and more. This can be configured and wired with a Lambda Function to help with the rotation.
Hashipcorp’s Vault – Everything that has to do with the security of the vault application is solely the user’s responsibility. Vault stores the passwords inside the machine it is installed in and encrypts the data. It supports various backend storages; Filesystem, AWS S3, Azure, Google Cloud Storage, MongoDB.
- API/SDK Integration
Here they all have APIs and SDKs to retrieve stored keys. So for this grading they all pass.
- General Features
AWS Secrets Manager
- Secured storage of secrets on AWS
- Allow encryption of keys stored via KMS
- Key rotation can be configured within a specific period
- Privilege Access Management (IAM)
Hashipcorp’s Vault
- Stores secret in the filesystem or a database
- Encryption as a Service
- Privilege Access Management
List of Hashicorp Vault Certification
- HashiCorp Certified Vault Associate
Hashicorp Vault Certification Cost
- $70.50 USD
plus locally applicable taxes and fees
Free retake not included
Best salary for Hashicorp Vault Certified Professional
- $46,606 per year
Best Hashicorp Vault Certification Tutorials
https://www.vaultproject.io/docs/concepts
Best Hashicorp Vault Certification Video Tutorials
Best Hashicorp Vault certification exercise dumps
https://learn.hashicorp.com/tutorials/vault/associate-questions
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