Vault 1.11.0 release notes

Software Release date: June 21, 2022

Summary: Vault Release 1.11.0 offers features and enhancements that improve the user experience while closing the loop on key issues previously encountered by our customers. We are providing a summary of these improvements in these release notes.

We encourage you to upgrade to the latest release to take advantage of the new benefits that we are providing. With this latest release, we offer solutions to critical feature gaps that have been identified previously. For further information on product improvements, including a comprehensive list of bug fixes, please refer to the Changelog within the Vault release.

Some of these enhancements and changes in this release include:

• Vault Consul secrets engine provides a templating policy to allow node and service identities to be set on the Consul token creation
• Snowflake secrets engine added a key/pair-based authentication
• Vault adds a Kubernetes secrets engine to allow creating dynamic k8s service accounts
• ADP-Transform extends its functionality by adding a convergent tokenization mode and a tokenization lookup
• ADP-KM adds four new operations
• Client count tooling improvements to help understand the attribution of clients better
• Integration storage autopilot improvements include auto upgrade and redundancy zones
• Plugin Multiplexing support is extended to secret and auth plugins, allowing them to be managed more efficiently with a single process

New features

This section describes the new features introduced as part of Vault 1.11.0.

Configure GCP auth to target non-public good API addresses

The GCP auth method only allows for public API endpoints to be configured for authentication purposes. Workloads running in GCP that do not have external internet access need the ability to authenticate using Private Google Access. In Vault 1.11.0, we allow for customization of certain service endpoints. For more information, refer to the GCP auth method documentation.

Support for key/pair based authentication for snowflake

In Vault 1.11.0, the Snowflake Database Engine supports an additional credential type that can be generated. For users not wanting to rely on the standard user/pass authentication to Snowflake, Vault can now dynamically generate RSA key pairs that allow users to authenticate into Snowflake. For more information, refer to the Snowflake Database Secrets Engine and Database Secrets Engine (API) documentation.

Dynamic kubernetes service account secrets

Kubernetes service accounts must be manually generated and passed to a Kubernetes configuration file or the command line using a CLI tool such as kubectl to interact with Kubernetes clusters. With this method, service account credentials, which contain static secrets, can be exposed and would require a periodic manual rotation. To address this issue, we now support generating short-lived dynamic service accounts and associate role bindings to specific Kubernetes namespaces. For more information, refer to the Kubernetes Auth Method and Kubernetes Auth Method (API) documentation.

New KV secrets engine (v2) utilities

The KV version 2 secrets engine now includes a set of utilities and enhancements for easier retrieval of key-value secrets and metadata. This includes:

• New optional Vault CLI mount flag (vault kv get -mount=secret foo).
• New flag to output a sample policy in HCL (-output-policy) for any Vault CLI command.
• New KV convenience/helper methods (GET and PUT) added to the Go client library.

For more details, refer to the Version Key/Value Secrets Engine tutorial.

Support for node identity and service identity for Vault consul secrets engine

Within the Consul secrets engine, practitioners writing a Vault role can specify node-identity or service-identity. You can also specify multiples of each identity on a Vault role. For more information, refer to the Consul Secrets Engine and Consul Secrets Engine (API) documentation.

Autopilot (Vault enterprise)

Vault release 1.7 introduced the Autopilot feature to Integrated Storage. In this release, new Autopilot features are added to Vault Enterprise to perform seamless automatic upgrades and support redundancy zones for improved cluster resiliency. Refer to the autopilot endpoint, operator raft, Autopilot, Automated Upgrades, and Redundancy Zones documentation for more information.

Other features and enhancements

This section describes other features and enhancements introduced as part of the Vault 1.11.0 release.

Import externally-generated keys into transit secrets engine

Historically, Vault has only allowed the Transit secrets engine to utilize keys that were created by Vault itself. In this release, we have introduced an import feature for the Transit secrets engine that enables individuals to bring externally-generated encryption keys into a Transit keyring. These keys can then be used identically to internally-generated Transit keys.

Improved CA rotation

PKI secrets engine users have sought a way to rotate root or intermediate CAs without causing service interruptions to any entities referencing them. Vault can now create the newly rotated PKI key pairs for servicing new certificates at the same path as the pre-existing keypair. This allows operators to gradually transition entities over to the new root certificate while the old is still active.

Client count tooling improvements

We have made the following improvements to the Client Count tooling:

• Provide the ability to export the unique clients that contribute to the client count aggregate for the selected billing period via a new activity export API endpoint. This feature is available in tech preview mode.
• Provide the ability to view changes to client counts month over month in the UI.

MFA enhancements

Vault 1.10 introduced Login MFA support for Vault Community Edition. In this release, we included additional enhancements to the Login MFA feature by introducing the ability to configure Login MFA via the UI and providing an enhanced TOTP configuration experience via the QR code scan.

Vault agent: support for using an existing valid certificate upon re-authentication

Enhancements have been made to the Vault Agent to support the parsing of a certificate that's been fetched. A new certificate will only be fetched upon a re-authentication if the certificate's lifetime has expired. This enhancement drastically reduces the resource overhead that Vault Agent users often experience due to over-fetching certificates.

Namespace enhancements for Vault terraform

With Terraform Vault provider v3.7.0, we have made enhancements where it’s now possible to specify the namespace directly within the resource or data source. All resource or data source-specific namespaces are relative to their provider’s configured namespace. This enhancement encourages a better workflow for namespaces, reduces execution time when handling failures of a Terraform plan, and eases the burden on system resources such as memory, CPU, etc.

ADP-Tranform enhancements

Two new enhancements were made to the Transform secrets engine. The first is Convergent Tokenization, which allows tokenization transformations to be configured as convergent. When enabled, this guarantees that tokenizing a given plaintext and expiration more than once always results in the same token value being produced. Please refer to the Convergent Tokenization document for more information. Token Lookup allows you to look up the value of a token given its plaintext. While this is not typically encouraged from a security perspective, it may be necessary for particular circumstances that require this operation. Note that token lookup is only supported when convergence is enabled. For more information on the endpoint, refer to the Lookup Token documentation.

KMIP support for import, query, encryption and decryption

Previously, KMIP did not support certain operations such as import, decrypt, encrypt, and query. These operations are now supported. For a complete list of supported KMIP operations, please refer to the Supported KMIP Operations documentation.

Postgres library change

Vault 1.11+ uses pgx instead of lib/pq for Postgres connections. If you are using parameters like fallback_application_name that pgx does not support, you may need to update your connection_url before upgrading to Vault 1.11+.

Known issues

When you use Vault 1.11.0+ as a Consul's Connect CA, you may encounter an issue generating the leaf certificates (GH-15525). Upgrade your Consul version that includes the fix to avoid running into this problem.

Feature deprecations and EOL

Please refer to the Deprecation Plans and Notice page for up-to-date information on feature deprecations and plans. An Feature Deprecation FAQ page is also available to address questions concerning decisions made about Vault feature deprecations.