Remove the versus section on the website. (#8538)

* Remove the versus section on the website.

We don't keep it maintained, it's very out of date, and we don't really
like comparing ourselves to other software anyways; it's not fair to
describe other software or solutions in ways that may not align with
how they want to be described.

Co-authored-by: Jeff Escalante <jescalan@users.noreply.github.com>
This commit is contained in:
Jeff Mitchell 2020-03-12 18:17:15 -04:00 committed by GitHub
parent 3f25dd8081
commit 8dd936d738
No known key found for this signature in database
GPG Key ID: 4AEE18F83AFDEB23
10 changed files with 28 additions and 288 deletions

View File

@ -160,16 +160,23 @@
# Rearranged out of `guides` but still on `.io`
/guides/partnerships/index.html /docs/partnerships
/intro/use-cases.html /docs/use-cases
/intro/vs/index.html /docs/vs
/intro/vs/chef-puppet-etc.html /docs/vs/chef-puppet-etc
/intro/vs/consul.html /docs/vs/consul
/intro/vs/custom.html /docs/vs/custom
/intro/vs/dropbox.html /docs/vs/dropbox
/intro/vs/hsm.html /docs/vs/hsm
/intro/vs/index.html /docs/vs
/intro/vs/keywhiz.html /docs/vs/keywhiz
/intro/vs/kms.html /docs/vs/kms
/intro/use-cases.html /docs/use-cases
/intro/vs/index.html /docs/vs
/intro/vs/chef-puppet-etc.html /docs/vs
/docs/vs/chef-puppet-etc /docs/vs
/intro/vs/consul.html /docs/vs
/docs/vs/consul /docs/vs
/intro/vs/custom.html /docs/vs
/docs/vs/custom /docs/vs
/intro/vs/dropbox.html /docs/vs
/docs/vs/dropbox /docs/vs
/intro/vs/hsm.html /docs/vs
/docs/vs/hsm /docs/vs
/intro/vs/index.html /docs/vs
/intro/vs/keywhiz.html /docs/vs
/docs/vs/keywhiz /docs/vs
/intro/vs/kms.html /docs/vs
/docs/vs/kms /docs/vs
/intro/what-is-vault/index.html /docs/what-is-vault
# Intro getting started content -> Learn

View File

@ -301,18 +301,6 @@ export default [
{
category: 'partnerships'
},
{
category: 'vs',
content: [
'chef-puppet-etc',
'hsm',
'dropbox',
'consul',
'kms',
'keywhiz',
'custom'
]
},
'----------------',
{
category: 'platform',

View File

@ -1,51 +0,0 @@
---
layout: docs
page_title: 'Vault vs. Chef, Puppet, etc.'
sidebar_title: 'Chef, Puppet, etc.'
description: >-
Comparison between Vault and configuration management solutions such as Chef,
Puppet, etc.
---
# Vault vs. Chef, Puppet, etc.
A big part of configuring software is setting up secrets: configuring a
web application to talk to a service, configuring the credentials of a
database, etc. Because of this, configuration management systems all face
a problem of safely storing these secrets.
Chef, Puppet, etc. all solve this in a similar way: single-key
encrypted storage. Chef has encrypted data bags, Puppet has encrypted
Hiera, and so on. The encrypted data is always one secret (a password,
a key, etc.) away from being decrypted, and this secret is generally
not well protected since in an elastic environment, every server needs
to somehow get this secret to decrypt the data. Additionally, access to
the encrypted data isn't always logged, so if there is an intrusion, it
isn't clear what data has been accessed and by who.
Vault is not tied to any specific configuration management system. You can
read secrets from configuration management, but you can also use the API
directly to read secrets from applications. This means that configuration
management requires fewer secrets, and in many cases doesn't ever have to
persist them to disk.
Vault encrypts the data onto physical storage and requires multiple
keys to even read it. If an attacker were to gain access to the physical
encrypted storage, it couldn't be read without multiple keys which are generally
distributed to multiple individuals. This is known as _unsealing_, and happens
once whenever Vault starts.
For an unsealed Vault, every interaction is logged in via the audit devices.
Even erroneous requests (invalid access tokens, for example) are logged.
To access any data, an access token is required. This token is usually
associated with an identity coming from a system such as GitHub, LDAP, etc.
This identity is also written to the audit log.
Access tokens can be given fine-grained control over what secrets can be
accessed. It is rare to have a single key that can access all secrets. This
makes it easier to have fine-grained access for consumers of Vault.
For tips on how to integrate Vault using configuration management, please see
[Using HashiCorp's Vault with Chef](https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/using-hashicorps-vault-with-chef/).
Although this post is about Chef, the principles can be broadly applied to many
of the tools listed here.

View File

@ -1,30 +0,0 @@
---
layout: docs
page_title: Vault vs. Consul
sidebar_title: Consul
description: Comparison between Vault and attempting to store secrets with Consul.
---
# Vault vs. Consul
[Consul](https://www.consul.io) is a system for service discovery, monitoring,
and configuration that is distributed and highly available. Consul also
supports an ACL system to restrict access to keys and service information.
While Consul can be used to store secret information and gate access using
ACLs, it is not designed for that purpose. As such, data is not encrypted
in transit nor at rest, it does not have pluggable authentication mechanisms,
and there is no per-request auditing mechanism.
Vault is designed from the ground up as a secret management solution. As such,
it protects secrets in transit and at rest. It provides multiple authentication
and audit logging mechanisms. Dynamic secret generation allows Vault to avoid
providing clients with root privileges to underlying systems and makes
it possible to do key rolling and revocation.
The strength of Consul is that it is fault tolerant and highly scalable.
By using Consul as a backend to Vault, you get the best of both. Consul
is used for durable storage of encrypted data at rest and provides coordination
so that Vault can be highly available and fault tolerant. Vault provides
the higher level policy management, secret leasing, audit logging, and automatic
revocation.

View File

@ -1,27 +0,0 @@
---
layout: docs
page_title: Vault vs. Custom Solutions
sidebar_title: Custom Solutions
description: Comparison between Vault and writing a custom solution.
---
# Vault vs. Custom Solutions
Many organizations resort to custom solutions for storing secrets,
whether that be Dropbox, encrypted disk images, encrypted SQL columns,
etc.
These systems require time and resources to build and maintain.
Storing secrets is also an incredibly important piece of infrastructure
that must be done correctly. This increases the pressure to maintain
the internal systems.
Vault is designed for secret storage. It provides a simple interface
on top of a strong security model to meet your secret storage needs.
Furthermore, Vault is an open source tool. This means that the tool is
as good as the entire community working together to improve it. This
isn't just features and bug fixes, but finding potential security holes.
Additionally, since it is open source, your own security teams can
review and contribute to Vault and verify it meets your standards
for security.

View File

@ -1,16 +0,0 @@
---
layout: docs
page_title: Vault vs. Dropbox
sidebar_title: Dropbox
description: Comparison between Vault and attempting to store secrets with Dropbox.
---
# Vault vs. Dropbox
It is an unfortunate truth that many organizations, big and small, often use Dropbox as a mechanism for storing secrets. It is so common that we've decided to make a special section for it instead of throwing it under the "custom solutions" header.
Dropbox is not made for storing secrets. Even if you're using something such as an encrypted disk image within Dropbox, it is subpar versus a real secret storage server.
A real secret management tool such as Vault has a stronger security model, integrates with many different authentication services, stores audit logs, can generate dynamic secrets, and more.
And, due to `vault` CLI, using `vault` on a developer machine is simple!

View File

@ -1,44 +0,0 @@
---
layout: docs
page_title: Vault vs. HSMs
sidebar_title: HSMs
description: Comparison between Vault and HSM systems.
---
# Vault vs. HSMs
A [hardware security module
(HSM)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_security_module) is a hardware
device that is meant to secure various secrets using protections against access
and tampering at both the software and hardware layers.
The primary issue with HSMs is that they are expensive and not very cloud
friendly. An exception to the latter is Amazon's CloudHSM service, which is
friendly for AWS users but still costs more than \$14k per year per instance,
and not as useful for heterogenous cloud architectures.
Once an HSM is up and running, configuring it is generally very tedious, and
the API to request secrets is also difficult to use. Example: CloudHSM requires
SSH and setting up various keypairs manually. It is difficult to automate. APIs
tend to require the use of specific C libraries (e.g. PKCS#11) or
vendor-specific libraries.
However, although configuring and running an HSM can be a challenge, they come
with a significant advantage in that they conform to government-mandated
compliance requirements (e.g. FIPS 140), which often require specific hardware
protections and security models in addition to software.
Vault doesn't replace an HSM. Instead, they can be complementary; a compliant
HSM can protect Vault's master key to help Vault comply with regulatory
requirements, and Vault can provide easy client APIs for tasks such as
encryption and decryption.
Vault can also do many things that HSMs cannot currently do, such as generating
_dynamic secrets_. Instead of storing AWS access keys directly within Vault,
Vault can generate access keys according to a specific policy on the fly. Vault
has the potential of doing this for any system through its mountable secret
backend system.
For many companies' security requirements, Vault alone is enough. For companies
that can afford an HSM or with specific regulatory requirements, it can be used
with Vault to get the best of both worlds.

View File

@ -1,23 +1,16 @@
---
layout: docs
page_title: Vault vs. Other Software
sidebar_title: Vault vs. Other Software
description: >-
Comparisons between Vault and other software that claim to store secrets in
some capacity.
page_title: Versus Other Software
---
# Vault vs. Other Software
# Versus Other Software
There are a number of other options in the market currently that claim
to store secrets in some capacity. This section compares Vault to these
other software choices.
Due to the bias of the comparisons being on the Vault website, we attempt
to only use facts. If you find something that is invalid or out of date
in the comparisons, please
[open an issue](https://github.com/hashicorp/vault/issues) and we'll
address it as soon as possible.
Use the navigation on the left to read comparisons of Vault versus other
systems.
Although we used to publish information about Vault versus other software, we
no longer do. Partly this is because the information grew exceedingly
out-of-date as Vault gained new functionality and features. More importantly,
just as we like to present information about Vault and its capabilities in the
ways that we prefer, we felt it wasn't appropriate to describe the capabilities
of other projects or products in ways other than their own terms. As a result,
we have decided to remove this section; please consult other projects or
products for information on how they might meet your needs, and use our
documentation or product pages to understand how Vault might meet your needs.

View File

@ -1,42 +0,0 @@
---
layout: docs
page_title: Vault vs. Keywhiz
sidebar_title: Keywhiz
description: Comparison between Vault and Keywhiz.
---
# Vault vs. Keywhiz
Keywhiz is a secret management solution built by Square. Keywhiz has a
client/server architecture based on a RESTful API. Clients of Keywhiz access
secrets through the API by authenticating with a client certificate or cookie.
To allow for flexible consumption of secrets by arbitrary software, clients may
also make use of a FUSE filesystem to expose secrets as files on disk, and use
Unix file permissions for access control. Human operators may authenticate
using a cookie-based authentication either via command line utilities or
through a management web interface.
Vault similarly is designed as a comprehensive secret management solution. The
client interaction with Vault is flexible both for authentication and usage of
secrets. Vault supports [mTLS authentication](/docs/auth/cert) along with
many [other mechanisms](/docs/auth). The goal is to make it easy
to authenticate as a machine for programmatic access and as a human for
operator usage.
Vault and Keywhiz expose secrets via an API. The Vault [ACL
system](/docs/concepts/policies) is used to protect secrets and gate
access, similarly to the Keywhiz ACL system. With Vault, all auditing is done
server side using [audit devices](/docs/audit).
Keywhiz focuses on storage and distribution of secrets and supports rotation
through secret versioning, which is possible in the Keywhiz UI and command-line
utilities. Vault also supports dynamic secrets and generating credentials
on-demand for fine-grained security controls, but adds first class support for
non-repudiation. Key rotation is a first class concern for Keywhiz and Vault,
so that no external systems need to be used.
Lastly, Vault forces a mandatory lease contract with clients. All secrets read
from Vault have an associated lease which enables operators to audit key usage,
perform key rolling, and ensure automatic revocation. Vault provides multiple
revocation mechanisms to give operators a clear "break glass" procedure after a
potential compromise.

View File

@ -1,38 +0,0 @@
---
layout: docs
page_title: Vault vs. Amazon Key Management Service
sidebar_title: Amazon KMS
description: Comparison between Vault and Amazon Key Management Service.
---
# Vault vs. Amazon KMS
Amazon Key Management Service (KMS) is a service provided in the AWS ecosystem
for encryption key management. It is backed by Hardware Security Modules (HSM)
for physical security.
Vault and KMS differ in the scope of problems they are trying to solve. KMS is
focused on securely storing encryption keys and supporting cryptographic
operations (encrypt and decrypt) using those keys. It supports access controls
and auditing as well.
In contrast, Vault provides a comprehensive secret management solution. The
[`transit` backend](/docs/secrets/transit) provides similar
capabilities as KMS, allowing for encryption keys to be stored and
cryptographic operations to be performed. However, Vault goes much further than
just key management.
The flexible secrets engines allow Vault to handle any type of secret data,
including database credentials, API keys, PKI keys, and encryption keys. Vault
also supports dynamic secrets, generating credentials on-demand for
fine-grained security controls, auditing, and non-repudiation.
Lastly, Vault forces a mandatory lease contract with clients. All secrets read
from Vault have an associated lease which enables operations to audit key
usage, perform key rolling, and ensure automatic revocation. Vault provides
multiple revocation mechanisms to give operators a clear "break glass"
procedure after a potential compromise.
Vault is an open source tool that can be deployed to any environment, and does
not require any special hardware. This makes it well suited for cloud
environments where HSMs are not available or are cost prohibitive.