![](data:image/svg+xml, %3Csvg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' height='64' class='font-weight-bold' style='font: 600 30.11764705882353px "SegoeUI", Arial' width='64'%3E%3Ccircle fill='hsl(204.8, 44%, 29%)' cx='32' cy='32' r='32' /%3E%3Ctext x='50%25' y='55%25' dominant-baseline='middle' text-anchor='middle' fill='%23FFF' %3ESS%3C/text%3E%3C/svg%3E)
Azure Key Vault
An Azure service that is used to manage and protect cryptographic keys and other secrets used by cloud apps and services.
1,309 questions
![](data:image/svg+xml, %3Csvg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' height='64' class='font-weight-bold' style='font: 600 30.11764705882353px "SegoeUI", Arial' width='64'%3E%3Ccircle fill='hsl(214.4, 81%, 30%)' cx='32' cy='32' r='32' /%3E%3Ctext x='50%25' y='55%25' dominant-baseline='middle' text-anchor='middle' fill='%23FFF' %3EMT%3C/text%3E%3C/svg%3E)
There are three ways to authenticate to Azure Key Vault:
1. Managed Identities
Managed Identities are assigned to Azure resources which needs access to Azure Key Vault. This is the recommended approach as Azure automatically rotates the identity and app/service doesn’t have to manage the secret.
Refer to What are managed identities for Azure resources? to know more about managed identities.
2. Service Principal and Secret
You can use a Service Principal and a secret to access a key vault. However, not recommended as it is hard to automatically rotate the secret used to authenticate to Key Vault.
3. Service Principal and Certificate
You can use a Service Principal and associated certificates to access key vault. The application owner/developer is required to rotate the certificates.