helm-external-secrets/docs/provider-hashicorp-vault.md

Hashicorp Vault

External Secrets Operator integrates with HashiCorp Vault for secret management. Vault itself implements lots of different secret engines, as of now we only support the KV Secrets Engine.

Authentication

We support three different modes for authentication: token-based, appRole and kubernetes-native, each one comes with it's own trade-offs. Depending on the authentication method you need to adapt your environment.

Token-based authentication

A static token is stored in a Kind=Secret and is used to authenticate with vault.

{% include 'vault-token-store.yaml' %}

AppRole authentication example

AppRole authentication reads the secret id from a Kind=Secret and uses the specified roleId to aquire a temporary token to fetch secrets.

{% include 'vault-approle-store.yaml' %}

Kubernetes authentication

Kubernetes-native authentication has three options of optaining credentials for vault:

1. by using a service account jwt referenced in serviceAccountRef
2. by using the jwt from a Kind=Secret referenced by the secretRef
3. by using transient credentials from the mounted service account token within the external-secrets operator

{% include 'vault-kubernetes-store.yaml' %}

LDAP authentication

LDAP authentication uses username/password pair to get an access token. Username is stored directly in a Kind=SecretStore or Kind=ClusterSecretStore resource, password is stored in a Kind=Secret referenced by the secretRef.

{% include 'vault-ldap-store.yaml' %}

JWT/OIDC authentication

JWT/OIDC uses a JWT token stored in a Kind=Secret and referenced by the secretRef. Optionally a role field can be defined in a Kind=SecretStore or Kind=ClusterSecretStore resource.

{% include 'vault-jwt-store.yaml' %}