Use HashiCorp Vault to Manage Access to Your Secrets

Contributed by: Prachi Jain

Difficulty level: Easy

Vault provides a seamless experience to manage access to your secrets via roles and policies. Role-based access control (RBAC) has been around forever and keeps things locked down tight. This Shortcut delves into it.

Roles: Your Identity in Vault

Similar to how you need a key to access a locked room, you need roles in HashiCorp Vault to get in. A role is like your identity in Vault. By assigning specific roles to specific user groups and applications, you can enforce the principle of least privilege, ensuring that users only have access to the secrets that they really need and nothing else.

Policies: Keepers of the Vault

Policies in Vault go hand in hand with roles. If roles are keys to rooms, policies dictate what actions you can perform once you’re in the room. Policies are rules for each role. They tell what actions users are permitted to perform on specific secrets. You can get as precise as you like when crafting policies using HashiCorp configuration language (HCL). You want to make sure that the right person gets access to the right secret. If a user only needs to read a secret, you want to ensure that you don’t provide them write or update access unnecessarily.

Demonstration

Let’s do a hands-on activity to understand this better. I am going to walk you through a simple example of enabling an authentication method and attaching a role and policy to it. Finally, ...