Last Attempt Vault-Associate Questions

To create a new user named “sally” with password “h0wN0wB4r0wnC0w” and the power-users policy, you would use the Vault userpass auth method mounted at auth/userpass. You would use the following command: “vault write auth/userpass/users/sally password=h0wN0wB4r0wnC0w policies=power-users”. This command would create a new user named “sally” with the specified password and policy. References:

• [Userpass Auth Method | Vault | HashiCorp Developer]
• [Create Vault policies | Vault | HashiCorp Developer]

The statement is false. An organization can authenticate an AWS EC2 virtual machine with Vault to access a dynamic database secret using more than one authentication method. The AWS auth method is one of the options, but not the only one. The AWS auth method supports two types of authentication: ec2 and iam. The ec2 type uses the signed EC2 instance identity document to authenticate the EC2 instance. The iam type uses the AWS Signature v4 algorithm to sign a request to the sts:GetCallerIdentity API and authenticate the IAM principal. However, the organization can also use other auth methods that are compatible with EC2 instances, suchas AppRole, JWT/OIDC, or Kubernetes. These methods require the EC2 instance to have some sort of identity material, such as a role ID, a secret ID, a JWT token, or a service account token, that can be used to authenticate to Vault. The identity material can be provisioned to the EC2 instance using various mechanisms, such as user data, metadata service, or cloud-init scripts. The choice of the auth method depends on the use case, the security requirements, and the trade-offs between convenience and control. References: AWS - Auth Methods | Vault | HashiCorp Developer, AppRole - Auth Methods | Vault | HashiCorp Developer, JWT/OIDC - Auth Methods | Vault | HashiCorp Developer, Kubernetes - Auth Methods | Vault | HashiCorp Developer

The command vault secrets enable transit enables the transit secrets engine at the transit path. The transit secrets engine is a secrets engine that handles cryptographic functions on data in-transit, such as encryption, decryption, signing, verification, hashing, and random bytes generation. The transit secrets engine does not store the data sent to it, but only performs the requested operations and returns the results. The transit secrets engine can also be viewed as “cryptography as a service” or “encryption as a service”. The command vault secrets enable transit uses the default path of transit for the secrets engine, but this can be changed by using the -path option. For example, vault secrets enable -path=my-transit transit would enable thetransit secrets engine at the my-transit path. References: Transit - Secrets Engines | Vault | HashiCorp Developer, vault secrets enable - Command | Vault | HashiCorp Developer

This screenshot is shown when you are enabling authentication methods in the GUI. Authentication methods are the ways users and applications authenticate with Vault. Vault supports many different authentication methods, including username and password, GitHub, and more. You can enable one or more authentication methods from the grid of options, which are divided into three categories: Generic, Cloud, and Infra. Each option has a name, a description, and a logo. You can also enable authentication methods using the Vault CLI or API.

Enabling policies, authentication engines, and secret engines are different tasks that are not related to this screenshot. Policies are rules that govern the access to Vault resources, such as secrets, authentication methods, and audit devices. Authentication engines are components of Vault that perform authentication and assign policies to authenticated entities. Secret engines are components of Vault that store, generate, or encrypt data. These tasks have different GUI pages and options than the screenshot.

References:

• [Authentication | Vault | HashiCorp Developer]
• [Policies | Vault | HashiCorp Developer]
• [Authentication | Vault | HashiCorp Developer]
• [Secrets Engines | Vault | HashiCorp Developer]