Feature deprecation FAQ

This page provides frequently asked questions concerning decisions made about Vault feature deprecations. If you are looking for information about Vault licensing, refer to the Licensing FAQ page. Pleaser refer to the Feature Deprecation Notice and Plans document for up-to-date information on Vault feature deprecations and notice.

Q: what is the impact on anyone using the legacy MFA feature?

If you are an Enterprise Vault user, there is no impact. There are no changes to the Enterprise MFA offering.

If you use Vault Community Edition and use the legacy MFA, this will impact you since we plan to deprecate the legacy MFA feature. However, while we will continue to provide support for MFA in Vault Community Edition in the upcoming Vault 1.10 release, our target is to remove the legacy MFA feature from the product in the following Vault 1.11 release. Therefore, you should plan to migrate to the new MFA feature when Vault Community Edition supports it.

Q: i'm currently using the etcd storage backend feature. how does the deprecation impact me?

The Etcd v2 has been deprecated with the release of Etcd v3.5 and will be decommissioned by Etcd v3.6. Etcd v2 API will be removed in Vault 1.10. The Etcd storage backend users should migrate Vault storage to an Etcd V3 cluster before upgrading to Vault 1.10. We recommend that you back up all storage migrations before upgrading.

If you are an Enterprise user, we recommend that you consider migrating to HashiCorp supported storage backends: Integrated Storage or Consul (if your use case requires you to use this). Your HashiCorp sales or support representative can assist you with this decision.

Q: what should i do if i use mount filters, AppID, or any of the standalone DB engines?

These features were deprecated in prior releases of Vault. We are targeting the removal of these features from the product in the Vault 1.12 release. Please plan to upgrade to these features before the release of Vault 1.12. Refer to the table below for a list of alternative features.

Deprecated Feature	Alternative Feature
Mount Filters	Path Filters
AppID	AppRole auth method
Standalone DB engines	Combined DB engines

Note: After upgrading to 1.12, any attempt to unseal a core with one of the following features enabled will result in a core shutdown. This may temporarily be overridden using the VAULT_ALLOW_PENDING_REMOVAL_MOUNTS environment variable when launching the Vault server. These features will be officially removed from Vault in version 1.13 and this environment variable will not work. In order to upgrade to 1.13, you will have to completely disable all removed features.

Q: what is the impact of removing support for x.509 certificates with signatures that use SHA-1?

Starting with Vault 1.12.0, Vault will be built with Go 1.18 or later. The standard library in Go 1.18 and later rejects X.509 signatures that use a SHA-1 hash.

If this issue impacts your usage of Vault, you can temporarily work around it by deploying Vault with the environment variable GODEBUG=x509sha1=1 set. This workaround will fail in a future version of Go, however, the Go team has not said when they will remove this workaround.

If you want to check whether a certificate or CA contains a problematic signature, you can use the OpenSSL CLI:

$ openssl x509 -text -noout -in somecert.pem | grep sha1

    Signature Algorithm: sha1WithRSAEncryption
    Signature Algorithm: sha1WithRSAEncryption

Any signature algorithms that contain sha1 will be potentially problematic.

Here are the use cases that may still use certificates with SHA-1:

Auth methods

AWS Auth Method: AWS can use SHA-1-based PKCS7 signatures for DSA key pairs.
Cloud Foundry (CF) Auth Method
Kerberos Auth Method
Kubernetes Auth Method
LDAP Auth Method
JWT/OIDC Auth Method
TLS Certificates Auth Method

Database secrets engines

Secrets engines

Q: what are the phases of deprecation?

As of version 1.12, Vault implements a multi-phased approach to deprecation. The intent of this approach is to provide sufficient warning that a feature will be removed and safe handling of stored data when the associated feature has been removed.

The phases of deprecation are also known as "Deprecation Status". These statuses are currently reflected in builtin plugins and are exposed via the Vault auth, secrets, and plugins CLI/API endpoints. For more information, refer to the corresponding documentation.

The four phases of deprecation are: Supported, Deprecated, Pending Removal, and Removed.

Note: Deprecation Status currently only applies to builtin auth and secrets plugins. All external plugins will report a status of n/a. This is expected behavior.

Supported

This is the default status and reflects a feature which is still supported. There is no unique behavior or functionality associated with this status.

Deprecated

This status reflects a feature which has been marked for deprecation in a later release of Vault. This is the first phase of the deprecation process. A status of Deprecated has two effects:

After an upgrade, any existing Deprecated feature (builtin auth/secrets plugins enabled via CLI or API prior to upgrade) will log Warn-level messages on unseal.
All new usage of Deprecated features will log Warn-level messages.
All POST/GET/LIST endpoints associated with this feature will return warnings in response data.

Pending removal

This status reflects a feature which has been officially deprecated in this release of Vault. This is the first phase in the process that fundamentally alters the behavior of Vault. The effects are two-fold:

After an upgrade, any existing Pending Removal feature (builtin auth/secrets plugins enabled via CLI or API prior to upgrade) will log Error-level messages to the Vault log and cause an immediate shutdown of the Vault core.
Any new Pending Removal will fail and log Error-level messages to the Vault log and CLI/API.

VAULT_ALLOW_PENDING_REMOVAL_MOUNTS

The Pending Removal behavior may be overriden using a new environment variable: VAULT_ALLOW_PENDING_REMOVAL_MOUNTS. This environment variable effectively allows all Pending Removal features to be treated as Deprecated.

Removed

This status reflects a feature which has been officially removed from Vault. Removed is the last phase of the deprecation process. During this phase, code for this feature no longer exists within Vault.

After an upgrade, any existing Removed feature will log Error-level messages to the Vault log and cause an immediate shutdown of the Vault core.
Any new Removed features will fail and log Error-level messages to the Vault log and CLI/API.

Migration path

In order to successfully upgrade, use of the Removed feature must be discontinued. To accomplish this:

Downgrade Vault to a previous version.
Replace any Removed or Pending Removal feature with the preferred alternative feature.
Upgrade to latest desired version.