In this blog post, we are explaining about how to prepare for the Hashicorp Vault Associate Certification exam. Also talks more about other details or topics that are required to focus on preparing for this exam. At the end of reading this blog post, you should be able to tell anyone what’s required to pass the Hashicorp Vault Associate Certification exam.
The Hashicorp Vault Associate Certification exam allows the Cloud Engineers to authenticate their basic security automation skills. This certification is about learning to use the open source security and authentication management tool Hashicorp Vault. Hashicorp Vault is a secret management tool that helps to store and retrieve the sensitive data in a low-trust environment.
Let’s dive deep into all the details of the certification and what it contains for you. We have also added few sample questions for this certification exam.
What is a Vault?
Vault refers to something that solves the Secret Management Problem. Secret Managements is about managing a set of different credentials.
- It can be anything that is capable of granting you the rights involving the authentication or authorisation to any system.
- Examples are usernames and passwords, or database credentials, API Tokens, TLS Certificates and more.
- All of these could be used to log in to a system and authenticate or authorize access.
So, it becomes necessary to manage them in a proper way and put a check on those having an access to these. Vault works by putting the data(plain text), that could be compromised, in a central location and encrypting it.
HashiCorp Certified Vault Associate Certification Exam
Hashicorp’s security automation (vault certification) certification is designed for the cloud engineers who specialize in the security, operations or development of the open source Hashicorp Vault. They are presumed to be aware of the basic concepts, skills and use cases associated with it. To be fully prepared for the exam, it is well suited that,
- The candidates possess a professional experience of using Vault in production.
- The candidates who have performed the exam objectives in a personal demo environment are also considered to be ready for taking the exam.
They should know about the enterprise features that exist and what can or cannot be done using the open source offering.
Prerequisites for the Exam
- Basic Terminal skills
- Basic Level Understanding of Security
- Basic understanding of on premise or cloud architecture
How to prepare for the Hashicorp Vault Associate Certification Exam?
To become a Hashicorp Vault Certified Associate, you must go through the below preparation steps:
Exam Objectives: Exam objectives or syllabus is the list of topics that are covered in the vault certification exam. You just have to keep this reference of these objectives while preparing for the exam. Here is the list of exam objectives for this hashicorp certification exam:
- Compare the authentication methods
- Create Vault Policies
- Assess the Vault Tokens
- Manage Vault Leases
- Configure and Compare the Vaults Secrets Engines
- Utilize Vault CLI
- Utilize Vault UI
- Be aware of the Vault API
- Explain the Architecture of Vault
- Explain Encryption as a Service
Each objective is further divided into subsections.
- https://www.hashicorp.com/certification/vault-associate – here you can find the certification exam syllabus.
Study Guide: This is the official study guide provided by the Hashicorp learning website. This will be the starting point of your preparation.This can be used when you are willing to study about all the objectives of the exam. In this study guide, you will find everything required for the hashicorp vault certification exam preparation.
Review Guide: The review guide is helpful if you possess a prior vault experience or have undergone its training, and want to study only some selected objectives of the exam. This review guide isss mapping each of the exam objectives to the actual topics in the study guide.
Important Preparation Tips
It is pretty normal to expect questions around each exam objective. Following are the concepts that would be helpful for you in learning various objectives of the certification:
- Vault Fundamentals: The exam is going to test you for your knowledge on the Vault Fundamentals including the Vault Architecture, how to seal or unseal vault, and Vault Authentication.
- Understand the various components of Vault, including storage backend, auth methods, cryptographic barriers and more.
- Learn how seal and unseal works using the Shamir’s Secret Sharing Algorithm, and the Auto Unseal Concept.
- Authentication: Revise the configuration of auh methods by making use of the UI and CLI.
- Tokens: The total number of accessors available on the Vault Servers constitute the number of tokens. Learn the concepts of Tokens including the Token Accessor, renewing and revoking the tokens, and more. Gain a familiarity on the Vault Token sub-commands such as capabilities, renew, create, lookup, and revoke.
- Access Management: Vault policies grants you access to the Vault managed secrets.
-
- You will be assessed on your knowledge of the basic commands managing policies and the Vault Policy Syntax.
-
- The exam will test you on your understanding of the challenges that are solved by the Vault Agent.
- Data Encryption: Data Encryption forms one of the main Vault Use Cases.
-
- You will be marked on your understanding of the Encryption as a Service(EaaS) in transit facility provided by the Vault, including its core functionality.
- Introduce an understanding of common scenarios involving the EaaS, and the challenges it faces and resolves.
- Vault Deployment Architecture: Understanding the production deployment basics is inevitable, with the Vault being the main source of Secrets.
-
- Prepare yourself to be tested on your understanding of the core Vault Operational tasks as well as the Vault Reference Architecture.
- You are going to be assessed, if you are having a good grasp on the Vault Enterprise Replication idea.
- You are recommended to go through the Vault Deployment Architecture diagrams and develop a clear understanding.
- Learn about the Enterprise Replication and what it is capable of achieving.
- Learn to differentiate between Performance Replication and Disaster Recovery Replication, Scaling and Fault-Tolerance, and more.
- Secrets Management: The liability for managing secrets lies on the Secrets Engines.
-
- The exam will assess you on your understanding of the operations and management of the Secret Engines.
- It will make you answer the Scenario-based questions to assess you in the identification of uses and advantages of the Secrets Engines.
Hashicorp Vault Certification Exam Details
This exam is currently conducted in the online proctor mode only. Here is the snapshot of vault associate certification exam details.
Additional Tips:
- Manage your time well: Do not spend too much time on a single question. If you have no idea on its concept, move on to the next question.
- Internet connectivity: Make sure that you have a high speed internet connection and your exam does not halt due to speed issues.
- Webcam check: This being an online proctored exam, will be supervised in real time via a Webcam, so ensure that your webcam is working beforehand to avoid any issues.
- Practice Tests: Work through multiple practice tests to ensure that you complete the certification on time, and with accuracy.
- Try the sample exam questions to confirm that you are fully prepared for the exam.
With all the preparation tips and tricks from the Whizlabs Team, we hope that you know what to expect from the exam. Do well!
Sample Practice Exam Questions
Here is the list of 5 sample questions that are taken from our Practice Tests (If you are interested please purchase our full length practices questions to pass Hashicorp Vault Certification Exam:
Domain : Tokens
Q1 : Does Vault allow you to renew the tokens after the token has reached the Max TTL?
A. Yes, you can renew the token using Vault Renew command
B. No, you cannot renew since the token has reached its max TTL from the time of generation.
Correct Answers: B
Explanation:
Token can be renewed repeatedly until it reaches its maximum TTL. For example, if a token’s TTL is 30 minutes and the maximum TTL is 24 hours, you can renew the token before reaching the 30 minutes. You can renew the token multiple times if you are using it. However, once the token reaches the 24 hours of its first creation, you can no longer renew the token.
- Option A is not valid as the token renew command will be errored out since the token max TTL has reached.
Reference: To know more about tokens, refer : https://learn.hashicorp.com/tutorials/vault/tokens?in=vault/auth-methods#ttl-and-max-ttl
Domain : Tokens
Q2 : David has generated an Orphan token. His superior would like to know if the Orphan token will expire when the parent token reaches its max TTL. David confirms it will expire once the Parent Token TTL has been reached. Is David right in this case?
A. Yes, David was right that the Orphan Token will expire once the Parent Token has expired.
B. No, David was wrong as Orphan Token are not children of Parent token, hence they don’t expire when parent token has expired.
Correct Answer: B
Explanation:
Orphan tokens are not children of their parents therefore, orphan tokens do not expire when their parent does.
- Option A is wrong because Parent Token does not affect the Orphan Token.
Reference: To know more about Orphan Token, refer : https://learn.hashicorp.com/tutorials/vault/tokens?in=vault/auth-methods#orphan-tokens
Domain : Auth Methods
Q3: We are allowed to customize the mount points for each Auth Method that is enabled. Is this statement correct?
A. True, you can specify the mount point path.
B. False, you cannot specify the mount point path
Correct Answer: A
Explanation:
You can define the path by specifying the path. Sample Command vault auth enable -path=my-login userpass
- Option B is wrong as you can specify the mount point path.
Reference: To read more about enabling auth methods, please refer : https://www.vaultproject.io/docs/auth
Domain : Auth Methods
Q4: When an auth method is disabled, will the users created using the auth method be able to access their secrets?
A. Yes, they can access until the Max TTL is reached
B. No, users are logged out immediately once the Auth Methods are disabled.
Correct Answer: B
Explanation:
When an auth method is disabled, all users authenticated via that method are automatically logged out.
- Option A is wrong as you cannot access the secrets even though TTL is active.
Reference: To read more about impact of disabling the auth methods, please refer :https://www.vaultproject.io/docs/commands/auth/disable
Domain : Vault Policies
Q5: The Administrator wants to grant a read-only policy for a particular business to read a secret? What is the syntax to be used?
A. path “secret/*”
{
capabilities = [“read”]
}
B. path “secret/*”
{
capabilities = [“read”, “list”]
}
C. path “secret/*”
{
capabilities = [“list”]
}
D. path “secret/*”
{
capabilities = [“update”]
}
Correct Answer: A
Explanation:
Read Capability should be defined in the policy by mentioning only Read in the syntax.
- Option B – Incorrect – List will list the secret which is not required in the question
- Option C – Incorrect – List alone with not allow the business to read the secret
- Option D – Incorrect – Update will give the business to update the secret but not read the secret.
Reference: To read more about policies, please refer : https://learn.hashicorp.com/tutorials/vault/policies
Summary
In this blog post we have explained everything about the Hashicorp Vault Associate Certification exam preparation techniques. This would definitely help you to prepare and pass this exam in the first attempt. We keep writing more about this certification exam in our blog posts (this post will be updated if there are any changes to this Hashicorp Vault certification exam), so please keep reading our blog posts.
Thank you!! Happy Learning!!
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