HashiCorp Vault

HashiCorp Vault makes it easy to store and securely access secrets to authenticate and secure connections. A secret is anything that you want to tightly control access to, such as tokens, API keys, passwords, encryption keys or certificates.

It can be difficult to understand who is accessing which secrets, especially since this can be platform-specific. Adding on key rolling, secure storage, and detailed audit logs is almost impossible without a custom solution. Vault validates and authorizes clients (users, machines, apps) before providing them access to secrets or stored sensitive data.

The core Vault workflow consists of four stages:

 

• Authenticate: Authentication in Vault is the process by which a client supplies information that Vault uses to determine if they are who they say they are. Once the client is authenticated against an auth method, a token is generated and associated to a policy.
• Validation: Vault validates the client against third-party trusted sources, such as Github, LDAP, AppRole, and more.
• Authorise: A client is matched against the Vault security policy. This policy is a set of rules defining which API endpoints a client has access to with its Vault token. Policies provide a declarative way to grant or forbid access to certain paths and operations in Vault.
• Access: Vault grants access to secrets, keys, and encryption capabilities by issuing a token based on policies associated with the client’s identity. The client can then use their Vault token for future operations.

Most enterprises have credentials sprawled across their organizations. Vault centralises these credentials to reduce unwanted exposure while also providing an audit trail of actions.

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 an 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.

Jellyfish Secrets Engine for HashiCorp Vault enables Hardware Protection for cryptographic objects stored in HashiCorp Vault. This enables organisations to centralise their users & computers cryptographic secrets stores.

Moving cryptographic secrets from local device storage (laptops, computers, servers) to HashiCorp Vault removes the risk of malicious actors accessing lost or stolen devices and gaining access to your system.

The Jellyfish secrets engine for HashiCorp Vault plugin, shown below, provides cloud HSM & Certificate Authority access to your local network. Enabling cryptographic security for users, computers and organisation without the need for expensive hardware and dedicated teams to manage.

The Jellyfish microservice network is fault tolerant and provides excellent reliability. Jellyfish Cloud has dedicated servers in multiple data centres throughout the country.

All secrets are encrypted between the end device and the Cloud HSM (Hardware Security Module). This not only prevents man in the middle attacks but also means your secrets are never seen by the Jellyfish network. Additionally, all HSM equipment used by Jellyfish Cloud has tamper protection. Unauthorized access to the physical devices will clear all stored keys. However, your keys are not lost and will still exist in at least 1 other HSM in another datacenter.

Download our Hashicorp Vault Fact Sheet below