I'm looking into vault for securing DB credentials used by various web applications. I've looked over a few Youtube videos, slide shares and even downloaded Vault to experiment with. I can't quite wrap my head around it.How does Vault protect credentials for something like a web application which uses a token to authenticate to Vault with? I'm assuming the Apache process would have to own the vault token (user token, not root token) so it can access secrets for the applications it's running. This would, it seems, expose any secrets the Apache process would have access to in the event of an application compromise. I don't see a big win here so I must be missing a lot.
How does hashicorp Vault work for securing DB credentials?
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In a nutshell, Vault supports authentication backends which then allow you to generate tokens. Tokens should be seen as temporary access and are not the same as a key.
In particular, Vault supports authentication with many different systems to generate dynamic secrets and credentials as needed. This is well documented here
In terms of security, the idea is to have a authentication backend as the primary, and the token being generated as a consequence. You are correct in saying hard coding tokens is a security risk. Once generated on the fly, they should have strict permissions and short TTLs. Vault makes this easy as you can define the scope of the token with an ACL.