open-vault/website/source/docs/configuration/seal/awskms.html.md

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docs	AWS KMS - Seals - Configuration	docs-configuration-seal-awskms	The AWS KMS seal configures Vault to use AWS KMS as the seal wrapping mechanism.

awskms Seal

The AWS KMS seal configures Vault to use AWS KMS as the seal wrapping mechanism. Vault Enterprise's AWS KMS seal is activated by one of the following:

• The presence of a seal "awskms" block in Vault's configuration file
• The presence of the environment variable VAULT_SEAL_TYPE set to awskms. If enabling via environment variable, all other required values specific to AWS KMS (i.e. VAULT_AWSKMS_SEAL_KEY_ID) must be also supplied, as well as all other AWS-related environment variables that lends to successful authentication (i.e. AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID, etc.).

awskms Example

This example shows configuring AWS KMS seal through the Vault configuration file by providing all the required values:

seal "awskms" {
  region     = "us-east-1"
  access_key = "AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE"
  secret_key = "wJalrXUtnFEMI/K7MDENG/bPxRfiCYEXAMPLEKEY"
  kms_key_id = "19ec80b0-dfdd-4d97-8164-c6examplekey"
}

awskms Parameters

These parameters apply to the seal stanza in the Vault configuration file:

• region (string: "us-east-1"): The AWS region where the encryption key lives. May also be specified by the AWS_REGION or AWS_DEFAULT_REGION environment variable or as part of the AWS profile from the AWS CLI or instance profile.

• access_key (string: <required>): The AWS access key ID to use. May also be specified by the AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID environment variable or as part of the AWS profile from the AWS CLI or instance profile.

• secret_key (string: <required>): The AWS secret access key to use. May also be specified by the AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY environment variable or as part of the AWS profile from the AWS CLI or instance profile.

• kms_key_id (string: <required>): The AWS KMS key ID to use for encryption and decryption. May also be specified by the VAULT_AWSKMS_SEAL_KEY_ID environment variable.

Authentication

Authentication-related values must be provided, either as environment variables or as configuration parameters.

~> Note: Although the configuration file allows you to pass in AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID as part of the seal's parameters, it is strongly recommended to set these values via environment variables.

AWS authentication values:

* `AWS_REGION` or `AWS_DEFAULT_REGION`
* `AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID`
* `AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY`

Note: The client uses the official AWS SDK and will use the specified credentials, environment credentials, shared file credentials, or IAM role/ECS task credentials in that order, if the above AWS specific values are not provided.

awskms Environment Variables

Alternatively, the AWS KMS seal can be activated by providing the following environment variables:

Vault Seal specific values:

* `VAULT_SEAL_TYPE`
* `VAULT_AWSKMS_SEAL_KEY_ID`

Key Rotation

This seal supports rotating the master keys defined in AWS KMS doc. Both automatic rotation and manual rotation is supported for KMS since the key information is stored with the encrypted data. Old keys must not be disabled or deleted and are used to decrypt older data. Any new or updated data will be encrypted with the current key defined in the seal configuration or set to current under a key alias.