github.com/dahs81/otto@v0.2.1-0.20160126165905-6400716cf085/website/source/docs/concepts/lease.html.md (about)

     1  ---
     2  layout: "docs"
     3  page_title: "Lease, Renew, and Revoke"
     4  sidebar_current: "docs-concepts-lease"
     5  description: |-
     6    Vault provides a lease with every secret. When this lease is expired, Vault will revoke that secret.
     7  ---
     8  
     9  # Lease, Renew, and Revoke
    10  
    11  With every secret and authentication token, Vault provides a _lease_:
    12  an amount of time that Vault promises that the data will be valid for.
    13  Once the lease is up, Vault can automatically revoke the data, and the
    14  consumer of the secret can no longer be certain that it is valid.
    15  
    16  The benefit should be clear: consumers of secrets need to check in with
    17  Vault routinely to either renew the lease (if allowed) or request a
    18  replacement secret. This makes the Vault audit logs more valuable and
    19  also makes key rolling a lot easier.
    20  
    21  All secrets in Vault are required to have a lease. Even if the data is
    22  meant to be valid for eternity, a lease is required to force the consumer
    23  to check in routinely.
    24  
    25  In addition to renewals, a lease can be _revoked_. When a lease is revoked,
    26  it invalidates that secret immediately and prevents any further renewals.
    27  For
    28  [dynamic secrets](#),
    29  the secrets themselves are often immediately disabled. For example, with
    30  the
    31  [AWS secret backend](/docs/secrets/aws/index.html), the access keys will
    32  be deleted from AWS the moment a secret is revoked. This renders the access
    33  keys invalid from that point forward.
    34  
    35  Revocation can happen manually via the API or `vault revoke`, or automatically
    36  by Vault. When a lease is expired, Vault will automatically revoke that
    37  lease.
    38  
    39  ## Lease IDs
    40  
    41  When reading a secret, such as via `vault read`, Vault always returns
    42  a `lease_id`. This is the ID used with commands such as `vault renew` and
    43  `vault revoke` to manage the lease of the secret.
    44  
    45  ## Lease Durations and Renewal
    46  
    47  Along with the lease ID, a _lease duration_ can be read. The lease duration
    48  is the time in seconds that the lease is valid for. A consumer of this
    49  secret must renew the lease within that time.
    50  
    51  When renewing the lease, the user can request a specific amount of time
    52  from now to extend the lease. For example: `vault renew my-lease-id 3600`
    53  would request to extend the lease of "my-lease-id" by 1 hour (3600 seconds).
    54  
    55  The requested increment is completely advisory. The backend in charge
    56  of the secret can choose to completely ignore it. For most secrets, the
    57  backend does its best to respect the increment, but often limits it to
    58  ensure renewals every so often.
    59  
    60  As a result, the return value of renews should be carefully inspected
    61  to determine what the new lease is.
    62  
    63  ## Prefix-based Revocation
    64  
    65  In addition to revoking a single secret, operators with proper access
    66  control can revoke multiple secrets based on their lease ID prefix.
    67  
    68  Lease IDs are structured in a way that their prefix is always the path
    69  where the secret was requested from. This lets you revoke trees of
    70  secrets. For example, to revoke all AWS access keys, you can do
    71  `vault revoke -prefix aws/`.
    72  
    73  This is very useful if there is an intrusion within a specific system:
    74  all secrets of a specific backend or a certain configured backend can
    75  be revoked quickly and easily.