VA-003 Practice Test 7 — 10 Questions

Question 1

Drag and drop the steps to perform a Vault disaster recovery using the replication feature into the correct order.

Accepted Answer

Step 1: Initialize clusters, Step 2: Enable primary replication, Step 3: Generate secondary activation token, Step 4: Enable secondary replication, Step 5: Promote secondary to primary if needed. Initialize clusters, enable primary replication, generate token, enable secondary, promote if needed.

Answer

Step 1: Generate secondary activation token, Step 2: Enable primary replication, Step 3: Enable secondary replication, Step 4: Initialize clusters, Step 5: Promote secondary to primary if needed

Answer

Step 1: Enable primary replication, Step 2: Enable secondary replication, Step 3: Initialize clusters, Step 4: Generate secondary activation token, Step 5: Promote secondary to primary if needed

Answer

Step 1: Enable secondary replication, Step 2: Enable primary replication, Step 3: Initialize clusters, Step 4: Generate secondary activation token, Step 5: Promote secondary to primary if needed

Question 2

A Vault cluster is sealed. An operator attempts to renew a lease but gets an error. What is the most likely error?

Accepted Answer

Vault is sealed. When Vault is sealed, it cannot process any operations, including lease renewal. The error would indicate the sealed state.

Answer

Upstream error

Answer

Permission denied

Answer

Lease not found

Question 3

Which THREE API endpoints are valid for managing policies in Vault?

Accepted Answer

GET /v1/sys/policy/{name}. The GET, DELETE, and POST endpoints are valid for managing policies in Vault. GET retrieves a policy, DELETE removes it, and POST creates or updates a policy. These correspond to the standard CRUD operations supported by Vault's sys/policy API.

Answer

PUT /v1/sys/policy/{name}

Answer

PATCH /v1/sys/policy/{name}

Question 4

Drag and drop the steps to set up Vault's Transit secrets engine for encryption/decryption into the correct order.

Accepted Answer

Enable the transit secrets engine, create a key, encrypt data, decrypt data, rotate the key. The correct order is to first enable the Transit secrets engine, then create a key, use the key to encrypt and decrypt data, and finally rotate the key for security. Enabling creates the path, key creation provides the encryption material, and rotation updates the key without interrupting operations.

Answer

Create a key, enable the transit secrets engine, encrypt data, decrypt data, rotate the key

Answer

Enable the transit secrets engine, create a key, rotate the key, encrypt data, decrypt data

Answer

Enable the transit secrets engine, encrypt data, create a key, decrypt data, rotate the key

Question 5

A DevOps team is using Vault's database secrets engine to generate dynamic credentials for a PostgreSQL database. They notice that the lease duration is set to 24 hours, but security policy requires that credentials expire after 1 hour. What should the team do to enforce the 1-hour expiration without changing the default lease TTL for all secrets?

Accepted Answer

Configure the role with a ttl of 1h.. The database secrets engine allows role-level TTL configuration that overrides the default lease duration for credentials generated from that role. By setting the role's `ttl` to 1h, the team enforces a 1-hour expiration for credentials created under that specific role without affecting the default lease TTL for all secrets or other roles. This directly meets the security policy requirement while maintaining flexibility for other secrets.

Answer

Set the mount's max_lease_ttl to 1h.

Answer

Ask each developer to set the TTL when requesting credentials.

Answer

Use a periodic token with a period of 1h.

Question 6

A Vault operator runs `vault status` and sees the output above. The Vault cluster is in production and currently unresponsive to API requests. What is the most likely cause of the unresponsiveness?

Accepted Answer

The Vault cluster is sealed.. The `vault status` output shows that the Vault cluster is sealed. When a Vault cluster is sealed, it cannot process any API requests because the encryption key required to decrypt the data is not available in memory. This is the most common cause of unresponsiveness in a production Vault cluster that has been properly initialized.

Answer

The cluster is not initialized.

Answer

The cluster does not have HA enabled.

Answer

The cluster has no active leader.

Question 7

An admin creates a token with TTL=48h and explicit_max_ttl=120h. The token is renewed every 24h. After 10 days, will the token still be valid?

Accepted Answer

No, because the total lifetime cannot exceed the explicit_max_ttl of 120h.. The token's total lifetime is capped by the `explicit_max_ttl` of 120 hours (5 days). Even though the token is renewed every 24 hours, the cumulative time since creation cannot exceed the explicit maximum TTL. After 10 days (240 hours), the token will have long surpassed the 120-hour limit and will be invalid.

Answer

Yes, because TTL refreshes to 48h on each renewal.

Answer

Yes, if renewed before TTL expires, it can persist indefinitely.

Answer

No, because tokens cannot be renewed more than 5 times.

Question 8

A developer wants to encrypt a string "hello" using Vault's transit engine. What must they send in the API request?

Accepted Answer

The plaintext "hello" as a base64 encoded string. E is correct because Vault's transit engine requires plaintext to be base64-encoded before encryption. The API endpoint expects the plaintext as a base64-encoded string in the `plaintext` field of the request body. This ensures binary-safe transmission and consistent encoding across different systems.

Answer

The ciphertext of "hello"

Answer

Both the key name and the ciphertext

Answer

A reference to the key

Answer

The plaintext "hello" in raw bytes

Question 9

A security team wants to ensure that tokens can be revoked immediately if a compromised token is detected, even if the token ID is unknown. Which token feature should they use?

Accepted Answer

Token accessors. Token accessors allow revocation of a token without knowing the token ID. They are specifically designed for this purpose.

Answer

Periodic tokens

Answer

Batch tokens

Answer

Orphan tokens

Question 10

An application using a service token fails to renew it, receiving an error 'permission denied'. The token has policies that include 'path "auth/token/renew-self" { capabilities = ["update"] }'. The token is not expired and has remaining TTL. What is a likely cause?

Accepted Answer

The token has reached its explicit max TTL. The token's explicit max TTL has been reached, preventing any further renewals even though the token still has remaining TTL. Option A is incorrect because num_uses=0 means unlimited uses, not that it has reached zero. Option B is incorrect because a batch token cannot be renewed at all, but the token's policy includes renew-self capability, indicating it is a service token. Option C is incorrect because if the parent token were revoked, the token itself would be revoked and invalid, not just failing to renew with a permission denied error.

Answer

The token's num_uses has reached zero

Answer

The token is a batch token

Answer

The token's parent was revoked