HashiCorp recently released Vault, an open source tool that protects and allows access to secrets within an organization. Examples of secrets include passwords, API keys and database credentials. Vault has the ability to encrypt secrets within a secret storage infrastructure, generate dynamic secrets on the fly that have a designated lifetime, encrypt data and revoke secrets as necessary. Designed for distributed infrastructures, Vault specializes in the management of the multitude of secrets necessary to deliver authentication for micro-services such as containers, or distributed applications more generally. The platform’s ability to lease secrets such that they expire after a designated period of time enables it to bolster the security of application and micro-services components within a distributed architecture that requires the orchestration of multiple components. Vault currently manages secrets within the HashiCorp application lifecycle management platform by taking ownership of secrets required by applications such as Packer, Terraform, Consul and Atlas. Vault is used by Cisco within its open source micro-services infrastructure community project and represents HashiCorp’s sixth open source project. The product illustrates the new demands on IT security imposed by distributed applications and microservices-based infrastructure and applications by underscoring the importance of a secret management solution that recognizes the way in which the different components that constitute contemporary infrastructures require heterogeneous secret management tools.
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