Vault
Please note: We take Vault's security and our users' trust very seriously. If you believe you have found a security issue in Vault, please responsibly disclose by contacting us at security@hashicorp.com.
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.
The key features of Vault are:
-
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 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 a SQL database without
having to design their own encryption methods.
-
Leasing and Renewal: All secrets in Vault have a lease associated
with them. 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.
Documentation, Getting Started, and Certification Exams
Documentation is available on the Vault website.
If you're new to Vault and want to get started with security automation, please
check out our Getting Started guides
on HashiCorp's learning platform. There are also additional guides
to continue your learning.
For examples of how to interact with Vault from inside your application in different programming languages, see the vault-examples repo. An out-of-the-box sample application is also available.
Show off your Vault knowledge by passing a certification exam. Visit the
certification page
for information about exams and find study materials
on HashiCorp's learning platform.
Developing Vault
If you wish to work on Vault itself or any of its built-in systems, you'll
first need Go installed on your machine.
For local dev first make sure Go is properly installed, including setting up a
GOPATH. Ensure that $GOPATH/bin
is in
your path as some distributions bundle the old version of build tools. Next, clone this
repository. Vault uses Go Modules,
so it is recommended that you clone the repository outside of the GOPATH.
You can then download any required build tools by bootstrapping your environment:
$ make bootstrap
...
To compile a development version of Vault, run make
or make dev
. This will
put the Vault binary in the bin
and $GOPATH/bin
folders:
$ make dev
...
$ bin/vault
...
To compile a development version of Vault with the UI, run make static-dist dev-ui
. This will
put the Vault binary in the bin
and $GOPATH/bin
folders:
$ make static-dist dev-ui
...
$ bin/vault
...
To run tests, type make test
. Note: this requires Docker to be installed. If
this exits with exit status 0, then everything is working!
$ make test
...
If you're developing a specific package, you can run tests for just that
package by specifying the TEST
variable. For example below, only
vault
package tests will be run.
$ make test TEST=./vault
...
Importing Vault
This repository publishes two libraries that may be imported by other projects:
github.com/hashicorp/vault/api
and github.com/hashicorp/vault/sdk
.
Note that this repository also contains Vault (the product), and as with most Go
projects, Vault uses Go modules to manage its dependencies. The mechanism to do
that is the go.mod file. As it happens, the presence of that file
also makes it theoretically possible to import Vault as a dependency into other
projects. Some other projects have made a practice of doing so in order to take
advantage of testing tooling that was developed for testing Vault itself. This
is not, and has never been, a supported way to use the Vault project. We aren't
likely to fix bugs relating to failure to import github.com/hashicorp/vault
into your project.
Acceptance Tests
Vault has comprehensive acceptance tests
covering most of the features of the secret and auth methods.
If you're working on a feature of a secret or auth method and want to
verify it is functioning (and also hasn't broken anything else), we recommend
running the acceptance tests.
Warning: The acceptance tests create/destroy/modify real resources, which
may incur real costs in some cases. In the presence of a bug, it is technically
possible that broken backends could leave dangling data behind. Therefore,
please run the acceptance tests at your own risk. At the very least,
we recommend running them in their own private account for whatever backend
you're testing.
To run the acceptance tests, invoke make testacc
:
$ make testacc TEST=./builtin/logical/consul
...
The TEST
variable is required, and you should specify the folder where the
backend is. The TESTARGS
variable is recommended to filter down to a specific
resource to test, since testing all of them at once can sometimes take a very
long time.
Acceptance tests typically require other environment variables to be set for
things such as access keys. The test itself should error early and tell
you what to set, so it is not documented here.
For more information on Vault Enterprise features, visit the Vault Enterprise site.