open-vault/website/source/docs/secrets/identity/index.html.md

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docs Identity - Secrets Engines docs-secrets-identity The Identity secrets engine for Vault manages client identities.

Identity Secrets Engine

Name: identity

The Identity secrets engine is the identity management solution for Vault. It internally maintains the clients who are recognized by Vault. Each client is internally termed as an Entity. An entity can have multiple Personas. For example, a single user who has accounts in both Github and LDAP, can be mapped to a single entity in Vault that has 2 personas, one of type Github and one of type LDAP. When a client authenticates via any of the auth methods (except "token"), Vault creates a new entity and attaches a new persona to it, if an entity doesn't already exist. The entity identifier will be tied to the authenticated token. When such tokens are put to use, their entity identifiers are audit logged, marking a trail of actions performed by specific users.

Identity store allows operators to manage the entities in Vault. Entities can be created and personas can be tied to entities, via the ACL'd API. There can be policies set on the entities which adds capabilities to the tokens that are tied to entity identiers. The capabilities granted to tokens via the entities are an addition to the existing capabilities of the token and not a replacement. Note that the additional capabilities of the token that get inherited from entities are computed at request time. This provides flexibility in controlling the access of tokens that are already issued.

This secrets engine will be mounted by default. This secrets engine cannot be unmounted or remounted.

API

The Identity secrets engine has a full HTTP API. Please see the Identity secrets engine API for more details.