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How does Vault verify the identity of the host requesting access to the credentials? I didn't find anything in the documentation that would give me information pertaining to that.

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It doesn't, at least not by itself. There are ways to make it work, though, if you're clever. We've got an internal daemon that watches for instance launches via SNS notifications (published to an SQS queue); the daemon then requests a bootstrap token from Vault on behalf of the new instance and passes it to the instance via another SQS queue.

The new instance then consumes the bootstrap token from the queue and exchanges it for whatever other tokens it has permission to obtain.

You can use the new AWS-EC2 auth backend in Vault 0.6

https://www.vaultproject.io/docs/auth/aws-ec2.html

That backend is very nascent, so don't oversell it. It currently is AMI dependent, making it next to useless for a lot of teams.

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