Lion Cipher Lab
Manage secrets with HashiCorp Vault on your own machine
- Cloud Security
- Beginner
- ~35 min
- Free · no account required
Why it matters
A cloud secrets manager is the professional home for credentials, but it lives in someone else's service and (for some options) can cost money. HashiCorp Vault is the open-source tool that does the same job on infrastructure you run yourself — it is one of the most widely deployed secrets managers in the industry, so the concepts you learn here are the ones real teams use in production. Running it locally in dev mode lets you see the whole model with zero risk and zero cost: a central encrypted store, access controlled by tokens and policies instead of file permissions, an audit trail, and…
What you'll learn
- what a secrets manager does (encrypted store, policy, audit)
- running Vault in dev mode locally
- writing and reading a secret via the KV engine
- tokens and policies as least privilege
- the idea of dynamic secrets
- what sealing and unsealing mean
Steps in this lab
- What Vault is, and the job it does
- Get Vault and start a dev server
- Point your terminal at the dev server
- Write and read a secret with the KV engine
- Tokens and policies: least privilege for secrets
- Dynamic secrets: credentials that generate and expire
- Sealing and unsealing: how Vault protects itself at rest
- Why running your own Vault is worth the practice