HashiCorp Vault

Use cases for using Vault ? How to mitigate the below mentioned cases

• For the plain text passwords stored in notepads
• AWS Access/Secret keys stored in notepads
• Tokens stored in notepads

We need a system with functionalities

• Manage Secrets and Protect Sensivite Data
• Idenity Based Access Managment
• Generate Dynamic Secrets[DB Creds,AWS Creds and others]
• Open Source

Use Case - Dynamic Secrets

• Users request credentials
• Vault share the dynamic secrets with lifespan for the secret
• When users request after the expiry , vault will generate new secret

Preparation materials
https://developer.hashicorp.com/vault/tutorials/associate-cert-003

Exam Pattern & Cost

Overview of Hashicorp Vault

• HashiCorp Vault allows organization to securely store secrets like tokens,passwords,certificates along with access management for protecting secrets.
• Secrets can include database passwords, AWS Secret/Secret keys, API Tokens, encryption keys
• Once vault is integrated with multiple backends, major access related to Access Management can be taken care by vault.

Installing Vault in Windows Servers:

• Vault installation is very easy
• You have a binary file, we need to download and use it

Supported platforms

• Windows
• macOS
• Linux
• FreeBSD
• NetBSD
• OpenBSD
• Solaris

Software download path

Overview of vault Dev mode

• The Dev server mode in Vault is useful for local development & testing
• Not very secure
• Everything is stored in-memory[will loose data on every restart]
• Start dev server by running the command vault server -dev

Copy the url - http://127.0.0.1:8200 , which is highlighted
and also copy the token, which is required for login

Go to command prompt and type Ctrl+X , it will break the dev url then the command

vault status

Error checking seal status: Get "http://127.0.0.1:8200/v1/sys/seal-status": dial tcp 127.0.0.1:8200: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it.

Try to run the dev URL command vault server -dev, render the url with the new token in the cmd prompt

Conclusion : Discussed about basics of Hashicorp vault, required software's to run the HashiCorp vault.
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