HashiCorp Announces Vault 1.9

Vault, the secret management tool designed to manage access to secrets or sensitive credentials, has been upgraded. The newest version (Vault 1.9) has been released to general availability (GA) on the 17th of November, 2021. This new update came with an OpenID Connect (OIDC) provider, a feature that gives an identity layer on top of an Open Authentication (OAuth) for users' verification against an authorization server. This feature enables applications to use Vaults’ pre-existing identities for authN into their applications.

The key management secret engine for google cloud also becomes generally available in this new version as it helps create, rotate, and revoke managed keys and encrypt and decrypt data. This feature allows the management of KMS keys through Vault’s policies and IAM.

The KV secrets engine V2 also came with patch secrets and custom metadata updates. The patch secrets can create a new version of an existing secret without exposing or reading the data. At the same time, the custom metadata endpoint enables teams to set version-agnostic custom key metadata for KV v2 secrets.

Also, the Transparent Data Encryption for Microsoft SQL Server feature provided Vault Enterprise users with the capability to manage encryption keys. There are additional features of using I/O formatting options when working with the FPE (Format Preserving Encryption) format. There are also improvements on the Transform data feature, whereby HashiCorp added support for advanced encoding and decoding template customizations. The Vault API also has a new feature of backwards-compatible Login function in the Go client library. It includes support for Kubernetes, AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud authentication, etc.

The UI of this new version has also been retouched, and it now displays additional PKI certificate metadata and supports using database secrets engines for PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, and Oracle.

To know more about Vault, You can check out the documentation