Need to manage IBM Cloud secrets within your own on-premises enterprise HashiCorp Vault service? We’re excited to announce the delivery of two foundational plugins to support this need.
The first is an authentication plugin that will allow your on-premises vault to interact with the IBM Cloud platform’s IAM service, and the second will allow you to generate IBM Cloud API keys from your on-prem Vaults.
The release
IBM Cloud Authentication plugin for HashiCorp Vault
Before you can interact with your on-premises Vault, the Vault must authenticate against an auth method. In this model, once authentication is established, a token is generated. This token is similar to a session ID on a website and may have attached policies, which can be mapped at authentication time. This plugin follows the design of other open-source Vault plugins. Vault supports auth methods by which user- or machine-supplied information is verified against external system.
What does this enable?
Your Vault instance can now be authenticated so that it can interact with platform services and their secrets:
Get started using this plugin in our public GitHub repo.
IBM Cloud API Key Secret Engine plugin for HashiCorp Vault
The IBM Cloud IAM secrets engine dynamically generates IBM Cloud IAM Service IDs and API keys along with assigning those service IDs to IAM access groups. Vault roles can be mapped to one or more IAM access groups (and, optionally, group assignments), providing a simple, flexible way to manage the permissions granted to generated service IDs and API keys.
What does this enable?
Once authenticated, your Vault can now generate API keys and use IAM to assign the right access to these keys: