Secure HashiCorp tools with TLS
Transport Layer Security (TLS) is a protocol that secures communications by encrypting data in transit and verifying communicators' identities. We recommend securing your deployments of HashiCorp tools with TLS to protect sensitive data in transit, authenticate communications, and support the integrity of your organization's information.
This guide will explore how to enable and configure TLS for Vault, Consul, and Nomad, helping you safeguard your organization's data and communications.
Secure Vault with TLS
When you secure your Vault cluster communications with TLS, you enhance the cluster's overall security posture. TLS also ensures that data transmitted between Vault nodes and clients remains confidential and tamper-proof.
Securing your Vault cluster deployments with mutual TLS is a crucial step for protecting sensitive data, and preventing unauthorized access. Operating Vault with TLS enabled enhances compliance, governance, auditing capabilities, and incident response.
Enable TLS in your Vault clusters to gain:
Improved data protection: prevent unauthorized access or communication with the Vault cluster to ensure data availability based on your security policies. Sensitive data is also protected in transit to prevent interception or tampering.
Strong identity verification: Vault cluster nodes and clients verify identities from TLS certificates before communicating to enable trusted operations and prevent impersonation.
Improved compliance and governance: Implementing mutual TLS in your Vault clusters aligns your deployments with industry best practices and regulatory requirements like HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and others.
Reduce risk of data leaks: When you operate Vault clusters with mutual TLS enabled, you minimize the risk of data leaks and unauthorized access to sensitive information.
Improved incident response: Mutual TLS helps to limit the exposure or damage from unauthorized access to sensitive data stored in Vault, making incident response more straightforward.
HashiCorp resources:
External resources:
Secure Consul with TLS
Securing your datacenter with TLS encryption is crucial to protecting data in transit. TLS also enables production deployments to ensure data confidentiality, integrity, and protection against eavesdropping or man-in-the-middle attacks.
Consul supports using TLS to verify the authenticity of servers and clients. When you enable TLS in your Consul deployments, they benefit from the following security enhancements:
Authentication and authorization: Enabling TLS ensures that Consul servers authenticate each other, and also requires clients to authenticate with servers. TLS in your Consul deployments also prevents impersonation attacks, which is important in environments where different teams or organizational departments use Consul.
Reduced attack surface: By securing Consul with TLS, you reduce available attack surface. TLS adds a layer of authentication, and makes it more difficult for malicious actors to exploit vulnerabilities or configure the system for unauthorized access.
Data protection: Enabling TLS in your Consul deployments encrypts data exchanged both between servers, and between clients and servers to protect sensitive information from eavesdropping or tampering by unauthorized parties.
Compliance and governance: When you implement TLS, your organization can more readily meet strict compliance requirements, such as those related to data protection like GDPR in the EU, and standards like PCI-DSS
Trust between services: When services communicate with each other using Consul, TLS builds trust among these services, and ensures their communications are secure and that you can audit them when needed.
Note
Consul features two distinct encryption strategies for communications: TLS as described here, and gossip encryption which is a separate function for securing the cluster consensus communications (known as 'gossip'). It is important to note that these are two independent encryption schemes for different purposes, and gossip encryption does not use TLS.
This guide focuses on TLS in Consul deployments, but you are strongly encouraged to enable and use both types of encryption in your Consul deployments.
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Secure Nomad with TLS
Securing Nomad cluster communication is important for security, but can also ease operations by preventing mistakes and configuration issues. By implementing encryption and authentication mechanisms, you protect against unauthorized access and data interception and ensure that only valid nodes and clients can join the cluster.
You should use TLS to secure your Nomad deployments. When you implement TLS, you secure communications within the environment, and gain some useful capabilities:
Encrypt data in transit: TLS encrypts data transmitted between components, ensuring that sensitive information such as service details, credentials, and secrets are not exposed to unauthorized parties. In Nomad environments, TLS secures communication between clients, servers, and user interfaces like the UI or CLI.
Authenticate: TLS ensures that verified parties can communicate with each other by using certificates. This prevents unauthorized nodes, services, or users from interacting with your cluster. Nomad uses TLS to authenticate between clients, servers, and the Nomad CLI/UI.
Prevent MITM attacks: Without TLS, attackers can intercept and change communications within your Nomad deployments. TLS mitigates this risk by encrypting data and verifying the identity of the communication participants.
Comply with regulations or standards: Compliance frameworks and regulations like PCI-DSS and HIPAA mandate the encryption of data in transit, making TLS a necessary implementation for orchestrators in regulated environments.
Securing service-to-service Communication: orchestrators often manage microservices that communicate over the network. TLS protects these internal service communications, which is important in multi-tenant or hybrid environments. In Nomad deployments, TLS secures communication between services, clients, and operators.
HashiCorp resources:
Next steps
This guide shares resources which help you learn how to secure your HashiCorp tools with TLS. You can use these resources to improve the overall security posture of your deployments, and ensure that your use of HashiCorp tools complies with industry standards and regulations.
Refer to the following best practices to learn more: