vaulted

Spawn environments from securely stored secrets.

With so many secrets floating around in our modern lives, it's a wonder we're able to keep track of any of them!

vaulted allows you to create vaults of related secrets and then spawn sessions with these secrets. Vaults can contain secure environment variables, AWS credentials, or SSH keys (RSA, DSA, & ECDSA).

vaulted also attempts to insulate spawned environments from other environments on the system. Temporary AWS credentials are created for each session as well as a new SSH agent. The SSH agent still allows access keys in the parent environment's SSH agent, but any keys added inside the spawned environment are only available in the that environment.

Installation

macOS

The easiest way to install vaulted on macOS is through Homebrew.

brew install vaulted

Linux

If you already have Linux Brew installed

brew install vaulted

If you do not use Linux Brew, you will need to build vaulted manually.

Manual

Installation on other platforms should be simple enough through go install as long as you have a proper Go environment setup:

go install github.com/miquella/vaulted@latest

Don't forget to add $GOPATH/bin to your $PATH! You must be running go version 1.12 or greater.

Getting Started

vaulted is oriented around vaults of secrets that are used to spawn environments. To get started, add a new vault:

vaulted add my-vault

This will start an interactive editing mode that will help you create your first vault. AWS keys, SSH keys, and arbitrary environment variables can be added to the vault. Once you have your vault arranged how you would like, use q to exit the interactive mode and save the vault to disk.

While editing a vault, Ctrl+C may be used to discard changes to the vault.

Now that your vault has been saved, the list of vaults will reflect your newly saved vault:

vaulted ls

And you can use vaulted to spawn a command in an environment generated from the secrets stored in the vault:

vaulted -n my-vault -- aws s3 ls

Sometimes it is useful to be able to issue multiple commands that require the vault's secrets. In this case, you can spawn an interactive shell:

vaulted shell my-vault

Warning! Leaving interactive shells with your credentials loaded can be dangerous as you may inadvertently provide credentials to an application you didn't intend!

File Locations

Vaults and cached sessions are stored according to the XDG Base Directory Specification.

Vault files are stored in:

$XDG_DATA_HOME/vaulted/ (typically ~/.local/share/vaulted/)
$XDG_DATA_DIRS/vaulted/ (typically /usr/local/share and /usr/share)

Vault files are written to $XDG_DATA_HOME/vaulted/. To backup your Vaulted data, all files in this directory should be backed up. Session cache files do not need to be retained.

Session cache files are stored in:

$XDG_CACHE_HOME/vaulted/ (typically ~/.cache/vaulted/)

Using Vaulted from other software

An env subcommand has been included with the intention of supplying machine readable output for integration with shells and shell utilities. Every effort has been made to supply meaningful return codes on failures along with a description of what has gone wrong. See vaulted(1) for details on the return values to expect and their meanings.

Going Further

While vaulted supports basic modification methods like copying, editing, and removing, more advanced methods such as JSON-formatted dumping and loading are also available. An environment can even be loaded into a running shell! See vaulted --help for available commands.

Spawned Environment

In addition to including secrets stored in the vault, spawned environments also include environment variables that describe how the session and environment were spawned. See vaulted-env(1) and vaulted-shell(1) for details.

GUI Password Prompts

GUI-based password prompts can be used by setting the VAULTED_ASKPASS variable. See vaulted(1) for more details.