hashicorp/vaultA tool for secrets management, encryption as a service, and privileged access management
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 [email protected].
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: Vault can store arbitrary key/value pairs. Vault encrypts data before writing it 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: Vault associates a lease with each secret. At the end of the lease, Vault automatically revokes the 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 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.
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, then setting the
GOBIN variable to $GOPATH/bin.
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
...
If you encounter an error like could not read Username for 'https://github.com' you may need to adjust your git config like so:
$ git config --global --add url."[email protected]:".insteadOf "https://github.com/"
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.
See also the section "Docker-based tests" below.
Vault has comprehensive acceptance tests covering most of the features of the secret and auth methods.