Learn about secrets management and data protection with HashiCorp Vault
Getting Started
Vault secures, stores, and tightly controls access to tokens, passwords, certificates, API keys, and other secrets in modern computing. Get started here.
Operations and Development Tracks
Day 1: Deploying Your First Vault Cluster
This learning path is designed to help you deploy your first Vault cluster. If you are responsible for setting up and maintaining a healthy cluster, this learning path will help you do so successfully.
Day 1: Deploying Vault on Kubernetes
This learning path is designed to help you plan and deploy Vault in a Kubernetes cluster.
Secrets Management
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.
Static Secrets: Key/Value Secret Engine
10 minVault supports generating new unseal keys as well as rotating the underlying encryption keys. This guide covers rekeying and rotating Vault's encryption keys.
Versioned Key/Value Secret Engine
10 minVault 0.10.0 introduced version 2 of the key-value secret engine which supports versioning your secrets so that you can undo the accidental deletion of secrets or compare different versions of a secret.
Cubbyhole Response Wrapping
10 minVault provides the capability to wrap the Vault response and store it in a cubbyhole where the holder of the one-time use wrapping token can unwrap it to uncover the secret.
Secrets as a Service: Dynamic Secrets
10 minVault can dynamically generate secrets on-demand for some systems.
Database Root Credential Rotation
10 minVault enables the combined database secret engines to automate the rotation of root credentials.
Identity and Access Management
This learning path guides you through Identity and Access Management topics including policies, authentication, identity, and secure introduction of Vault clients.
Tokens
10 minTokens are the core method for authentication within Vault. For every authentication token and dynamic secret, Vault creates a lease containing information such as duration, renewability, and more. This guide helps you understand the lifecycle of tokens.
Policies
10 minPolicies provide a declarative way to grant or forbid access to certain paths and operations in Vault. This guide walks through policy creation workflows.
Identity: Entities and Groups
10 minThis guide demonstrates the commands to create entities, entity aliases, and groups. For the purpose of the demonstration, the userpass auth method will be used.
ACL Policy Path Templating
10 minAs of 0.11, ACL policies support templating to allow non-static policy paths.
[Enterprise] Sentinel Policies
10 minVault Enterprise supports Sentinel to provide a rich set of access control functionality. This guide walks through the creation and use of role governing policies (RGPs) and endpoint governing policies (EGPs).
Encryption as a Service
Vault provides Encryption as a Service (EaaS) to enable security teams to fortify data during transit and at rest. So even if an intrusion occurs, your data is encrypted and the attacker would never get a hold of the raw data.
Encryption as a Service: Transit Secrets Engine
10 minHashiCorp Vault's transit secrets engine handles cryptographic functions on data in-transit. It can also be understood as encryption as a service.
Java Application Demo
15 minThis guide discusses the concepts necessary to help users understand Vault's AppRole authentication pattern and how to use it to securely introduce a Vault authentication token to a target server, application, container, etc. in a Java environment.
Transit Secrets Re-wrapping
10 minThe goal of this guide is to demonstrate one possible way to re-wrap data after rotating an encryption key in the transit engine in Vault.
[Enterprise] HSM Integration - Seal Wrap
10 minThis guide demonstrates how Vault's seal wrap feature works to encrypt your secrets leveraging FIPS 140-2 certified HSM.
Security
This learning path focuses on the topics that are related to tightening the access to secrets managed by Vault. This includes Entities & Groups, Control Groups, Mount Filters, and Namespaces.
Tokens
10 minTokens are the core method for authentication within Vault. For every authentication token and dynamic secret, Vault creates a lease containing information such as duration, renewability, and more. This guide helps you understand the lifecycle of tokens.
Secure Introduction of Vault Clients
10 minThis introductory guide walk through the mechanism of Vault clients to authenticate with Vault. There are two approaches at a high-level: platform integration, and trusted orchestrator.
AppRole With Terraform & Chef
10 minThis guide discusses the concepts necessary to help users understand Vault's AppRole authentication pattern and how to use it to securely introduce a Vault authentication token to a target server, application, or container.
[Enterprise] KMIP Secrets Engine
8 minVault 1.2 introduced a Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP) secrets engine which allows Vault to serve as a KMIP server.
Build Your Own Certificate Authority (CA)
10 minThe 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.
Operations
This learning path is designed for the operations professional who will stand up Vault and manage certificates, replication, user accounts, and more.
Vault Reference Architecture
8 minThis guide provides guidance in the best practices of Vault implementations through use of a reference architecture.
Production Hardening
10 minThis guide provides guidance on best practices for a production hardened deployment of HashiCorp Vault.
Vault Deployment Guide
10 minThis deployment guide covers the steps required to install and configure a single HashiCorp Vault cluster as defined in the Vault Reference Architecture
Vault High Availability with Consul
10 minThis guide will walk you through a simple Vault Highly Available (HA) cluster implementation. While this is not an exhaustive or prescriptive guide that can be used as a drop-in production example, it covers the basics enough to inform your own production setup.
[Tech Preview] Vault HA Cluster with Integrated Storage
5 minA storage backend is responsible for providing durable storage of encrypted data. Vault supports a number of configurable storage options (e.g. Consul, Cassandra, MySQL, etc.). Vault's integrated storage is introduced as a new storage directly implemented within Vault.
Developer
This learning path is designed for developers who are integrating their systems with Vault to protect their sensitive data.
Tokens
10 minTokens are the core method for authentication within Vault. For every authentication token and dynamic secret, Vault creates a lease containing information such as duration, renewability, and more. This guide helps you understand the lifecycle of tokens.
Static Secrets: Key/Value Secret Engine
10 minVault supports generating new unseal keys as well as rotating the underlying encryption keys. This guide covers rekeying and rotating Vault's encryption keys.
Versioned Key/Value Secret Engine
10 minVault 0.10.0 introduced version 2 of the key-value secret engine which supports versioning your secrets so that you can undo the accidental deletion of secrets or compare different versions of a secret.
Cubbyhole Response Wrapping
10 minVault provides the capability to wrap the Vault response and store it in a cubbyhole where the holder of the one-time use wrapping token can unwrap it to uncover the secret.
Secrets as a Service: Dynamic Secrets
10 minVault can dynamically generate secrets on-demand for some systems.
Static Secrets: Key/Value Secret Engine
10 minVault supports generating new unseal keys as well as rotating the underlying encryption keys. This guide covers rekeying and rotating Vault's encryption keys.
Versioned Key/Value Secret Engine
10 minVault 0.10.0 introduced version 2 of the key-value secret engine which supports versioning your secrets so that you can undo the accidental deletion of secrets or compare different versions of a secret.
Cubbyhole Response Wrapping
10 minVault provides the capability to wrap the Vault response and store it in a cubbyhole where the holder of the one-time use wrapping token can unwrap it to uncover the secret.
Secrets as a Service: Dynamic Secrets
10 minVault can dynamically generate secrets on-demand for some systems.
Database Root Credential Rotation
10 minVault enables the combined database secret engines to automate the rotation of root credentials.
Tokens
10 minTokens are the core method for authentication within Vault. For every authentication token and dynamic secret, Vault creates a lease containing information such as duration, renewability, and more. This guide helps you understand the lifecycle of tokens.
Policies
10 minPolicies provide a declarative way to grant or forbid access to certain paths and operations in Vault. This guide walks through policy creation workflows.
Identity: Entities and Groups
10 minThis guide demonstrates the commands to create entities, entity aliases, and groups. For the purpose of the demonstration, the userpass auth method will be used.
ACL Policy Path Templating
10 minAs of 0.11, ACL policies support templating to allow non-static policy paths.
[Enterprise] Sentinel Policies
10 minVault Enterprise supports Sentinel to provide a rich set of access control functionality. This guide walks through the creation and use of role governing policies (RGPs) and endpoint governing policies (EGPs).
Encryption as a Service: Transit Secrets Engine
10 minHashiCorp Vault's transit secrets engine handles cryptographic functions on data in-transit. It can also be understood as encryption as a service.
Java Application Demo
15 minThis guide discusses the concepts necessary to help users understand Vault's AppRole authentication pattern and how to use it to securely introduce a Vault authentication token to a target server, application, container, etc. in a Java environment.
Transit Secrets Re-wrapping
10 minThe goal of this guide is to demonstrate one possible way to re-wrap data after rotating an encryption key in the transit engine in Vault.
[Enterprise] HSM Integration - Seal Wrap
10 minThis guide demonstrates how Vault's seal wrap feature works to encrypt your secrets leveraging FIPS 140-2 certified HSM.
Tokens
10 minTokens are the core method for authentication within Vault. For every authentication token and dynamic secret, Vault creates a lease containing information such as duration, renewability, and more. This guide helps you understand the lifecycle of tokens.
Secure Introduction of Vault Clients
10 minThis introductory guide walk through the mechanism of Vault clients to authenticate with Vault. There are two approaches at a high-level: platform integration, and trusted orchestrator.
AppRole With Terraform & Chef
10 minThis guide discusses the concepts necessary to help users understand Vault's AppRole authentication pattern and how to use it to securely introduce a Vault authentication token to a target server, application, or container.
[Enterprise] KMIP Secrets Engine
8 minVault 1.2 introduced a Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP) secrets engine which allows Vault to serve as a KMIP server.
Build Your Own Certificate Authority (CA)
10 minThe 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.
Vault Reference Architecture
8 minThis guide provides guidance in the best practices of Vault implementations through use of a reference architecture.
Production Hardening
10 minThis guide provides guidance on best practices for a production hardened deployment of HashiCorp Vault.
Vault Deployment Guide
10 minThis deployment guide covers the steps required to install and configure a single HashiCorp Vault cluster as defined in the Vault Reference Architecture
Vault High Availability with Consul
10 minThis guide will walk you through a simple Vault Highly Available (HA) cluster implementation. While this is not an exhaustive or prescriptive guide that can be used as a drop-in production example, it covers the basics enough to inform your own production setup.
[Tech Preview] Vault HA Cluster with Integrated Storage
5 minA storage backend is responsible for providing durable storage of encrypted data. Vault supports a number of configurable storage options (e.g. Consul, Cassandra, MySQL, etc.). Vault's integrated storage is introduced as a new storage directly implemented within Vault.
Tokens
10 minTokens are the core method for authentication within Vault. For every authentication token and dynamic secret, Vault creates a lease containing information such as duration, renewability, and more. This guide helps you understand the lifecycle of tokens.
Static Secrets: Key/Value Secret Engine
10 minVault supports generating new unseal keys as well as rotating the underlying encryption keys. This guide covers rekeying and rotating Vault's encryption keys.
Versioned Key/Value Secret Engine
10 minVault 0.10.0 introduced version 2 of the key-value secret engine which supports versioning your secrets so that you can undo the accidental deletion of secrets or compare different versions of a secret.
Cubbyhole Response Wrapping
10 minVault provides the capability to wrap the Vault response and store it in a cubbyhole where the holder of the one-time use wrapping token can unwrap it to uncover the secret.
Secrets as a Service: Dynamic Secrets
10 minVault can dynamically generate secrets on-demand for some systems.
Looking for specific Vault information? The Vault documentation provides reference material and in-depth details on: