open-vault/website/source/guides/static-secrets.html.md

---
layout: "guides"
page_title: "Securing Secrets - Guides"
sidebar_current: "guides-foundation-static-secrets"
description: |-
  Vault supports generating new unseal keys as well as rotating the underlying
  encryption keys. This guide covers rekeying and rotating Vault's encryption
  keys.
---

# Securing secrets

Vault can be used to store any secrets in a secure manner.  The secrets may be
SSL certificates and keys for your organization's domain, credentials to connect
to a corporate database server, etc. Storing such sensitive information in a
plaintext is not desirable. This guide demonstrates the use case of Vault as a
Secret Storage.


## Reference Material

- [Key/Value Secret Backend](/docs/secrets/kv/index.html)
- [Key/Value Secret Backend API](/apikey/secret/kv/index.html)
- [Client libraries](/apikey/libraries.html) for Vault API for commonly used languages

## Estimated Time to Complete

10 minutes

## Challenge

Consider the following situations:

- Developers use a single admin account to access a third-party app
  (e.g. Splunk) and anyone who knows the user ID and password can log in as an
  admin
- SSH keys to connect to remote machines are shared and stored as a plaintext
- API keys to invoke external system APIs are stored as a plaintext
- An app integrates with LDAP, and its configuration information is in a
  plaintext

Organizations often seek an uniform solution to store any sensitive information
securely.

## Solution

Leverage Vault as a centralized secret storage to secure any sensitive
information. 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.

## Prerequisites

To perform the tasks described in this guide, you need to have a Vault
environment.  You can follow the [Getting Started][getting-started] guide to
[install Vault][install-vault]. Alternatively, if you are familiar with
[Vagrant](https://www.vagrantup.com/), you can spin up a
[HashiStack](https://github.com/hashicorp/vault-guides/tree/master/provision/hashistack/vagrant)
virtual machine.

Make sure that your Vault server has been [initialized and unsealed][initialize].

**NOTE:** The Vault server can be running in a [dev
mode](/intro/getting-started/dev-server.html) to perform the tasks described in
this guide.

[getting-started]: /intro/getting-started/install.html
[install-vault]: /intro/getting-started/install.html
[initialize]: /intro/getting-started/deploy.html


## Steps

This guide demonstrates the basic steps to store secrets using Vault.  The
scenario here is to store the following secrets:

- API key (Google API)
- Root certificate of a production database (MySQL)

To store your API key within the configured physical storage for Vault, use the
key/value secret backend via **`secret/`** prefixed.

-> Key/Value secret backend passes through any operation back to the configured
storage backend for Vault. For example, if your Vault server is configured with
Consul as its storage backend, a "read" operation turns into a read from Consul
at the same path.



You will perform the following:

1. [Store the Google API key](#step1)
2. [Store the root certificate for MySQL](#step2)
3. [Retrieve the secrets](#step3)

### <a name="step1"></a>Step 1: Store the Google API key

#### CLI command

```shell
vault write secret/<PATH> <KEY>=VALUE>
```

The `<PATH>` can be anything you want it to be, and your organization should
decide on the naming convention that makes most sense.

**Example:**

```shell
vault write secret/eng/apikey/Google key=AAaaBBccDDeeOTXzSMT1234BB_Z8JzG7JkSVxI
Success! Data written to: secret/eng/apikey/Google
```

> In this example, the path
> convention is **`secret/<OWNER>/apikey/<APP>`**. Therefore, `secret/eng/apikey/Googl`.
> The key is "key" and its value is "AAaaBBccDDeeOTXzSMT1234BB_Z8JzG7JkSVxI".
> If you have an API key for New Relic owned by the DevOps team, the path may
> look like `secret/devops/apikey/New_Relic`.

#### API call using cURL

To perform the same task using the Vault API, pass the token in the request header.

**Example:**

```shell
curl $VAULT_ADDR/v1/secret/eng/apikey/Google -X POST \
 -H "X-Vault-Token: $VAULT_TOKEN" --data '{"key": "AAaaBBccDDeeOTXzSMT1234BB_Z8JzG7JkSVxI"}'
```


### <a name="step2"></a>Step 2: Store the root certificate for MySQL

#### CLI command

The command is basically the same as the Google API key example.

**Example:**

```shell
vault write secret/prod/cert/mysql cert=@root_cert.pem
```

**NOTE:** Any value begins with "@" is loaded from a file.

This example reads the root certificate from a PEM file from the disk, and store it under
`secret/prod/cert/mysql` path.

> The path convention here is **`secret/<ENVIRONMENT>/cert/<SYSTEM>`**. This path
> has an environment flag (`prod`) to indicate that this is a root certificate
> for MySQL in production. If there is a root certificate for a PostgreSQL
> running in staging, you may store it in `secret/staging/cert/postgres`.


#### API call using cURL

To perform the same task using the Vault API, pass the token in the request header.

**Example:**

```shell
curl $VAULT_ADDR/v1/secret/eng/apikey/Google -X POST \
 -H "X-Vault-Token: $VAULT_TOKEN" --data @root_cert.pem
```



### <a name="step3"></a>Step 3: Retrieve the secrets

Retrieving the secret from Vault is simple.  

#### CLI command

```shell
vault read secret/<PATH>
```

**Example:**

```shell
vault read secret/eng/apikey/Google
Key             	Value
---             	-----
refresh_interval	768h0m0s
key             	AAaaBBccDDeeOTXzSMT1234BB_Z8JzG7JkSVxI
```

To return the key value alone, pass `-field=key` as an argument.

```shell
vault read -field=key secret/eng/apikey/Google
AAaaBBccDDeeOTXzSMT1234BB_Z8JzG7JkSVxI
```

#### Root certificate example:

```shell
vault read -field=cert secret/prod/cert/mysql
-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
MIIEowIBAAKCAQEA6E2Uq0XqreZISgVMUu9pnoMsq+OoK1PI54rsA9vtDE6wiRk0GWhf5vD4DGf1
...
```

#### API call using cURL

**Example:**

```shell
curl $VAULT_ADDR/v1/secret/eng/apikey/Google -X GET -H "X-Vault-Token: $VAULT_TOKEN" | jq

{
"request_id": "5a2005ac-1149-2275-cab3-76cee71bf524",
"lease_id": "",
"renewable": false,
"lease_duration": 2764800,
"data": {
  "key": "AAaaBBccDDeeOTXzSMT1234BB_Z8JzG7JkSVxI"
},
"wrap_info": null,
"warnings": null,
"auth": null
}
```

**NOTE:** This example uses `jq` to parse the JSON output.

Retrieve the key value with `jq`:

```shell
curl $VAULT_ADDR/v1/secret/eng/apikey/Google -X GET \
 -H "X-Vault-Token: $VAULT_TOKEN" | jq ".data.key"
```

#### Root certificate example:

```shell
curl $VAULT_ADDR/v1/secret/prod/cert/mysql -X GET \
 -H "X-Vault-Token: $VAULT_TOKEN" | jq ".data.cert"
```

## Reference Content

### Q: How do I enter my secrets without appearing in history?

As a precaution, you may wish to avoid passing your secret as a part of the CLI
command so that the secret won't appear in the history file.  Here are a few
techniques you can use.

#### Option 1: Use a dash "-"

An easy technique is to use a dash "-" and then press Enter. This allows you to
enter the secret in a new line. After entering the secret, press **`Ctrl+d`** to
end the pipe and write the secret to the Vault.

```shell
vault write secret/eng/apikey/Google key=-

AAaaBBccDDeeOTXzSMT1234BB_Z8JzG7JkSVxI
<Ctrl+d>
```

#### Option 2: Read the secret from a file

Using the Google API key example, you can create a file containing the key (apikey.txt):

```text
{
  "key": "AAaaBBccDDeeOTXzSMT1234BB_Z8JzG7JkSVxI"
}
```

The CLI command would look like:

```shell
vault write secret/eng/apikey/Google @apikey.txt
```

#### Option 3: Disable all vault command history

Sometimes, you may not even want the vault command itself to appear in history
at all.  The Option 1 and Option 2 prevents the secret to appear in the history;
however, the vault command, `vault write secret/eng/apikey/Google` will appear
in history.

In bash:

```shell
export HISTIGNORE="&:vault"
```

**NOTE:** This prevents the use of the Up arrow key for command history as well.


### Q: How do I save multiple values?

The two examples introduced in this guide only had a single key-value pair.  You can pass multiple values in the command.

```shell
vault write secret/dev/config/mongodb url=foo.example.com:35533 db_name=users \
 username=admin password=pa$$w0rd
```

Or, read the secret from a file:

```shell
$ vault write secret/dev/config/mongodb @mongodb.txt

$ cat mongodb.txt
{
  "url": "foo.example.com:35533",
  "db_name": "users",
  "username": "admin",
  "password": "pa$$w0rd"
}
```


## Next steps