Vault PKI Essentials

"Vault PKI Essentials" "Vault PKI Essentials" offers a comprehensive and practical exploration of building and managing Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) using HashiCorp Vault. The book begins with foundational concepts, demystifying PKI principles, lifecycle management, and trust models, while highlighting the unique architecture and extensibility of the Vault platform. Readers are guided through the nuances of Vault's secrets engines, operational threats, and crucial terminology, preparing them to navigate both traditional and modern PKI landscapes with clarity and confidence. Moving beyond theory, the book delves deep into the internals and architecture of Vault's PKI engine, covering everything from core data structures and certificate management to advanced topics like auditability, scalability, and disaster recovery. Step-by-step deployment strategies lead readers through initialization, trust hierarchy establishment, and zero-downtime migrations-ensuring resilient, high-availability operations for organizations of all sizes. Emphasis on secure policies, fine-grained access models, comprehensive automation, and integration with secret management makes this work an essential technical manual. Tailored for system architects, security practitioners, and DevOps professionals, "Vault PKI Essentials" addresses real-world challenges such as compliance, incident response, performance tuning, and multi-cloud integration. The book concludes by equipping readers with strategies for cryptographic agility and future-ready PKI, including post-quantum cryptography, policy-as-code, and emerging identity patterns. Complete with guidance for open source contribution and strategic PKI roadmapping, this book is an indispensable resource for anyone striving to modernize secrets management and escalation-resistant identity in today's cloud-native world.