---
layout: docs
page_title: Secure external data with Vault
description: >-
Secure external data with Vault transit, tokenization, and transforms.
---
# Secure external data with Vault
Not all personally identifiable information (PII) lives in Vault. For example,
you may need to store credit card numbers, patient IDs, or social security
numbers in an external databases.
It can be difficult to secure sensitive data outside Vault and balance the
need for applications to access the data efficiently while adhering to
stringent security standards and protocols. Vault helps you secure external data
with **transit encryption**, **tokenization**, and **transforms**.
Transform consists of three modes, called _transformations_. Format Preserving
Encryption (**FPE**) for encrypting and decrypting values while retaining their
formats. **Masking** for replacing sensitive information with masking
characters. And **Tokenization** which replaces sensitive information with
mathematically unrelated tokens.
## Encrypt sensitive data with Vault transit
Encrypting sensitive data is an obvious solution for protecting sensitive data.
But independently implementing robust data encryption can be complex and
expensive. The Vault transit plugin encrypts data, returns the resulting
ciphertext, and manages the associated encryption keys. Your application only
ever persists the ciphertext and never deals directly with the encryption key.
For example, the following diagram shows a credit card number going into the
transit system and returning to persistent storage as encrypted data.
The tradeoff with encryption is that the ciphertext is often much longer than
the original data. Additionally, the ciphertext can contain characters that
are not allowed in the original data, which may cause your system to reject the
encrypted data. As a result, you may modify your database schema or adjust your
data validation system to avoid rejecting the encrypted data.
## Tokenize sensitive data
Tokenization safeguards sensitive information by randomly generating a token
with a one-way cryptographic hash function. Rather than storing the data
directly, the system saves the token to persistent storage and maintains a
mapping between the original data and the token.
Combining effective tokenization and a robust random number generator ensures
protected data security regardless of where the data lives. However, even if
tokenization hides the format of the data, it can be a leaky abstraction if the
final token ends up the same length of the original data. Additionally, when the
token length matches the original length, format checkers may not realize the
data is tokenized and could reject the tokenized value as "invalid data".
Tokenization also presents scalability challenges because the hash table expands
any time the system stores a new tokenized value. A rapidly expanding hash table
affects storage and performance as the speed of hash searches declines.
Maintaining cryptographic data security with tokenization is a complex task that
requires protection of the tokenized data **and** the hash table to ensure data
integrity and security.
## Obscure sensitive data with Vault transform
The Vault transform plugin requires a Vault Enterprise license with Advanced
Data Protection (ADP).
We recommend using the Vault transform plugin for securing external, sensitive
data with Vault. The transform plugin supports three transformations:
- format preserving encryption
- data masking
- tokenization
In addition to providing the option of data masking, Vault transform simplifies
some of the complexities with stand-alone encryption and tokenization.
### Format preserving encryption
Format preserving encryption (FPE) is a two-way transformation that encrypts
external data while maintaining the original format and length. For example,
transforming a credit card number to an encoded ciphertext made of 16 numbers.
Unlike stand-alone encryption, FPE maintains the original length and data
structure for encoded data so the transformed data works with your existing
database schema and validation systems. And, unlike tokenization, FPE preserves
the original structure without the risk of leaky abstraction.
Vault uses
the [FF3-1](https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/sp/800-38g/rev-1/draft) algorithm
to ensure the security of the encoded ciphertexts. The National Institute of
Standards and Technology (NIST) vets, updates, and tests the FF3-1 algorithm
to protect against specific types of attacks and potential future threats from
supercomputers.
In addition to providing built-in transformation templates for common data like
credit card numbers and US social security numbers, format preserving encryptions
support custom transformation templates. You can use regular expressions to
specify the values you want to transform and enforce a schema on the encoded
value.
FPE transformation is also stateless, which means that Vault does not store the
protected secret. Instead, Vault protects the encryption key needed to decrypt
the ciphertext. By only storing the information needed to decrypt the
ciphertext, Vault provides maximum performance for encoding and decoding
operations while also minimizing exposure risk for the data.
### Data masking
Data masking is a one-way transformation that replaces characters on the input
value with a predefined translation character.
Masking is non-reversible. We do not recommend masking for situations where
you need to retrieve and decode the original value.
Data masking is a good solution when you need to show or print sensitive data
without full readability. For example, masking a a bank account number in an
online banking portal to prevent potential security breaches from bad actors who
might be observing the screen.
### Tokenization
Unlike standalone tokenization, tokenization with Vault transform is a two-way,
random encoding that satisfies the PCI-DSS requirement for data irreversibility
while still allowing you to decode tokens back to their original plaintext.
To support token decoding, Vault secures a cryptographic mapping of tokens and
plaintext values in internal storage. Even if an attacker steals the underlying
transformation key and mapping values from Vault, tokenization of the data
prevents the attacker from recovering the original plaintext.
Vault transform creates a new key for each tokenization transformation, which
helps ensure a strong cryptographic distinction between different tokenization
use cases. For example, a credit card processor may want to distinguish between
the same credit card number used by different merchants without having to decode
the token.
Tokenization transform also supports automatic key rotation based on a
configurable time interval and minimum key version. Each configured tokenization
transformation keeps a set of versioned keys. When a key rotates, older key
versions, within the configured age limit, are still available for decoding
tokens generated in the past. Vault cannot decode generated tokens with keys
below the minimum key version.
By default, tokenization produces a unique token for every encode operation.
Vault transform supports **convergent tokenization**, which lets you use the
same encoded value for a given input.
Convergent tokenization lets you perform statistical analysis of the tokens
in your system **without decoding the token**. For example, counting the
entries for a given token, querying relationships between a token and other
fields in your database, and relating information that is tokenized across
multiple systems.
### Performance considerations with Vault transform
Tokenization transformation is stateful, which means the encode operation must
perform writes to storage on the primary node of your Vault cluster. As a
result, any storage performance limits on the primary node also limits
scalability of the encode operation.
In comparison, neither Vault transit encryption nor FPE transformation write to
storage, and both can be horizontally scaled using performance standby nodes.
For high-performance use cases, we recommend that you configure Vault to store
the token mapping in an external database. External stores can achieve a much
higher performance scale and reduce the load on the internal storage for your
Vault installation.
Vault currently supports the following external storage systems:
- PostgreSQL
- MySQL
- MSSQL.
For more information on external storage, review the
[Tokenization transform storage](/vault/docs/secrets/transform/tokenization#storage)
documentation.
### Learn more about Vault transform
- [Transform secrets engine tutorial](/vault/tutorials/adp/transform)
- [Transform tokenization overview](/vault/docs/secrets/transform/tokenization)
- [Encrypt data with Transform tutorial](/vault/tutorials/adp/transform-code-example)
- [Tokenize data with Transform tutorial](/vault/tutorials/adp/tokenization)
- [Transform secrets engine API](/vault/api-docs/secret/transform)