What is a secret?
A secret is a piece of sensitive information. For example, an API key, password, or any type of credential that you might use to access a confidential system.
By using secrets, you're able to authenticate to protected resources as you build your applications. For example, when you try to access an external service API, you're asked to provide a unique credential. After you supply your credential, the external service can understand who you are and whether you're authorized to interact with it.
Working with secrets
For the Trial and Standard plans, secrets in Secrets Manager can be static or dynamic, and are classified by type based on their general purpose. Each secret has a lifecycle that moves through defined states from creation to destruction.
The following topics apply:
- Secret types and components: The types of secrets you can create, how each type is structured, and a feature comparison across types.
- Secret states and transitions: How secrets move through pre-activation, active, deactivated, and destroyed states during their lifecycle.
For the Vault Dedicated plan, secrets are managed through native HashiCorp Vault secrets engines. Each engine handles a specific class of secret, from static key-value pairs to dynamically generated certificates and encryption keys.
The following topics apply:
- Working with secrets engines: An overview of how secrets engines work in Vault Dedicated and how to enable them.
- Supported secrets engines: The secrets engines available during the public beta, including KV v2, Transit, PKI, Transform, and TOTP.