[ANN] Vault 1.6.0 Released

[Meggie Ladlow]

Hi folks,

The Vault team is happy to announce the release of Vault 1.6!

Open-source binaries can be downloaded at [1]. Enterprise binaries are available to customers as well.

As a reminder, if you believe you have found a security issue in Vault, please responsibly disclose by emailing secu...@hashicorp.com and do not use the public issue tracker. Our security policy and our PGP key can be found at [2].

The key features and improvements in this release are:

• Integrated Storage Cloud Auto Join: This feature for integrated storage enables Vault nodes running in the cloud to automatically discover and join a Vault cluster via operator-supplied metadata.
• Integrated Storage Auto Snapshots (Enterprise): This feature enables an operator to schedule snapshots of the integrated storage backend and ensure those snapshots are persisted elsewhere.
• Tokenization (Enterprise; Tech Preview): Tokenization supports creating irreversible “tokens” from sensitive data. Tokens can be used in less secure environments, protecting the original data.
• Key Management Secrets Engine (Enterprise; Tech Preview): This new secret engine allows securely distributing and managing keys to Azure cloud KMS services.
• Vault Client Count: The Vault web UI and API have been enhanced to display the number of active clients, unique entities, and active direct tokens.
• Seal Migration: With Vault 1.6, we will support migrating from an auto unseal mechanism to a different mechanism of the same type. For example, if you were using an AWS KMS key to automatically unseal, you can now migrate to a different AWS KMS key.
• Couchbase Secrets: Vault can now manage static and dynamic credentials for Couchbase.
• Expanded Password Policy Support: Custom password policies[8] are now supported for all database engines.

See the Changelog at [3] for the full list of improvements and bug fixes.

OSS [5] and Enterprise [6] Docker images will be available soon.

Upgrading

See [4] for general upgrade instructions.

As always, we recommend upgrading and testing this release in an isolated environment. If you experience any non-security issues, please report them on the Vault GitHub issue tracker or post to the Vault Discuss Forum at [7].

We hope you enjoy Vault 1.6!

Sincerely, The Vault Team

[1] https://releases.hashicorp.com/vault/1.6.0
[2] https://www.hashicorp.com/security
[3] https://github.com/hashicorp/vault/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#160
[4] https://www.vaultproject.io/docs/upgrading
[5] https://hub.docker.com/_/vault
[6] https://hub.docker.com/r/hashicorp/vault-enterprise
[7] https://discuss.hashicorp.com/c/vault
[8] https://www.vaultproject.io/docs/concepts/password-policies