Vault-Associate Exam Dumps : HashiCorp Certified: Vault Associate (002)

The Google Cloud Secrets Engine is the best option for the DevOps team to provision VMs in GCP via a CICD pipeline and integrate Vault to protect the credentials used by the tool. The Google Cloud Secrets Engine can dynamically generate GCP service account keys or OAuth tokens based on IAM policies, which can be used to authenticate and authorize the CICD tool to access GCP resources. The credentials are automatically revoked when they are no longer used or when the lease expires, ensuring that the credentials are short-lived and secure. The DevOps team can configure rolesets or static accounts in Vault to define the scope and permissions of the credentials, and use the Vault API or CLI to request credentials on demand. The Google Cloud Secrets Engine also supports generating access tokens for impersonated service accounts,which can be useful for delegating access to other service accounts without storing or managing their keys1.

The Identity Secrets Engine is not a good option for this use case, because it does not generate GCP credentials, but rather generates identity tokens that can be used to access other Vault secrets engines or namespaces2. The Key/Value Secrets Engine version 2 is also not a good option, because it does not generate dynamic credentials, but rather stores and manages static secrets that the user provides3. The SSH Secrets Engine is not a good option either, because it does not generate GCP credentials, but rather generates SSH keys or OTPs that can be used to access remote hosts via SSH4.

References:

• Google Cloud - Secrets Engines | Vault | HashiCorp Developer
• Identity - Secrets Engines | Vault | HashiCorp Developer
• KV - Secrets Engines | Vault | HashiCorp Developer
• SSH - Secrets Engines | Vault | HashiCorp Developer

The transit secrets engine is not a good solution for binaries of this size, because it is designed to handle cryptographic functions on data in-transit, not data at-rest. The transit secrets engine does not store any data sent to it, so it would require sending the entire 2GB blob to Vault for encryption or decryption, which would be inefficient and impractical. A better solution would be to use the transit secrets engine to generate a data key, which is a high-entropy key that can be used to encrypt or decrypt data locally. The data key can be returned in plaintext or wrapped by another key, depending on the use case. This way, the transit secrets engine only handles the encryption or decryption of the data key, not the data itself, and the data can be stored in any primary data store. References: Transit - Secrets Engines | Vault | HashiCorp Developer, Encryption as a service: transit secrets engine | Vault | HashiCorp Developer

Running the second command in the GUI CLI will fail. The second command is vault kv put secret/creds passcode=my-long-passcode. This command attempts to write a secret named creds with the value passcode=my-long-passcode to the secret path, which is the default path for the kv secrets engine. However, the kv secrets engine is not enabled at the secret path, as shown by the first command vault secrets list, which lists the enabled secrets engines and their paths. The only enabled secrets engine is the transit secrets engine at the transit path. Therefore, the second command will fail with an error message saying that no secrets engine is mounted at the path secret/. To make the second command succeed, the kv secrets engine must be enabled at the secret path or another path, using the vault secrets enable command. For example, vault secrets enable -path=secret kv would enable the kv secrets engine at the secret path. References: kv - Command | Vault | HashiCorp Developer, vault secrets enable - Command | Vault | HashiCorp Developer