Create Secrets with Vaults Transits Secret Engine

Vault's transit secrets engine handles cryptographic functions on data-in-transit. Vault doesn't store the data sent to the secrets engine, so it can also be viewed as encryption as a service.

In this tutorial we will demonstrate how to use Vault's Transit Secret Engine.

Enable the Transit Engine:

Enable transit secret engine using the /sys/mounts endpoint:

$ curl --header "X-Vault-Token: $VAULT_TOKEN" -XPOST -d '{"type": "transit", "description": "encs encryption"}' http://127.0.0.1:8200/v1/sys/mounts/transit

Create the Key Ring:

Create an encryption key ring named fookey using the transit/keys endpoint:

$ curl -s --header "X-Vault-Token: $VAULT_TOKEN" -XGET http://127.0.0.1:8200/v1/transit/keys/fookey | jq
{
  "request_id": "8375227a-4a9f-a108-0b89-84c448419e80",
  "lease_id": "",
  "renewable": false,
  "lease_duration": 0,
  "data": {
    "allow_plaintext_backup": false,
    "deletion_allowed": false,
    "derived": false,
    "exportable": false,
    "keys": {
      "1": 1554654295
    },
    "latest_version": 1,
    "min_available_version": 0,
    "min_decryption_version": 1,
    "min_encryption_version": 0,
    "name": "fookey",
    "supports_decryption": true,
    "supports_derivation": true,
    "supports_encryption": true,
    "supports_signing": false,
    "type": "aes256-gcm96"
  },
  "wrap_info": null,
  "warnings": null,
  "auth": null
}

Encoding

Encode your string:

$ base64 <<< "hello world"
aGVsbG8gd29ybGQK

Encrypt

To encrypt your secret, use the transit/encrypt endpoint:

$ curl -s --header "X-Vault-Token: $VAULT_TOKEN" --request POST  --data '{"plaintext": "aGVsbG8gd29ybGQK"}' http://127.0.0.1:8200/v1/transit/encrypt/fookey | jq
{
  "request_id": "ab00ba0f-9e45-0aca-e3c1-7765fd83fc3c",
  "lease_id": "",
  "renewable": false,
  "lease_duration": 0,
  "data": {
    "ciphertext": "vault:v1:Yo4U6xXFM2FoBOaUrw0w3EpSlJS6gmsa4HP1xKtjrk0+xSqi5Rvjvg=="
  },
  "wrap_info": null,
  "warnings": null,
  "auth": null
}

Decrypt:

Use the transit/decrypt endpoint to decrypt the ciphertext:

$ curl -s --header "X-Vault-Token: $VAULT_TOKEN" --request POST  --data '{"ciphertext": "vault:v1:Yo4U6xXFM2FoBOaUrw0w3EpSlJS6gmsa4HP1xKtjrk0+xSqi5Rvjvg=="}' http://127.0.0.1:8200/v1/transit/decrypt/fookey | jq
{
  "request_id": "3d9743a0-2daf-823c-f413-8c8a90753479",
  "lease_id": "",
  "renewable": false,
  "lease_duration": 0,
  "data": {
    "plaintext": "aGVsbG8gd29ybGQK"
  },
  "wrap_info": null,
  "warnings": null,
  "auth": null
}

Decoding

Decode the response:

$ base64 --decode <<< "aGVsbG8gd29ybGQK"
hello world

Resources

Vault Documentation on this topic

Thank You

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