API / Vault interview questions
1. What is the Vault?
Vault is a tool for securely accessing secrets. A secret is anything that you want to tightly control access to, such as API keys, passwords, or certificates. Vault provides a unified interface to any secret, while providing tight access control and recording a detailed audit log.
2. Does Vault encrypt secrets prior to writing it to persistent storage?
Yea.
3. What are the Key Features of Vault?
Secure Secret Storage: Arbitrary key/value secrets can be stored in Vault. Vault encrypts these secrets prior to writing them to persistent storage, so gaining access to the raw storage isnt enough to access your secrets. Dynamic Secrets: Vault can generate secrets on-demand for some systems, su...
4. What are the security considerations when using Vault in a production environment?
Network Security: Ensure that the communication between the client and the Vault server is encrypted and that the network is properly secured. This can be done by using TLS certificates and ensuring the network is isolated from the internet. Access control: Vault should be configured with appropr...
5. Explain Vault policy.
Vault uses policies to control the behavior of clients and to provide Role Based Access Control (RBAC) by specifying access privileges for users. Vault creates a root policy during initialization and makes this policy available to the superuser only. The root policy allows the superuser to enable...
6. What is the Vault Transit engine?
Vault Transit Secret Engine provides encryption as a service. By storing encryption keys in Vault, it allows you to encrypt/decrypt and sign/verify arbitrary pieces of data. This functionality has several advantages, such as limited key exposure, so the keys never leave the Vault.
