VA-003 Explain encryption as a service Practice Question
A multinational corporation uses Vault Enterprise with the transit engine to encrypt sensitive financial data across multiple cloud regions. Each region has its own Vault cluster, and they use performance replication to synchronize transit keys. Recently, the team in the Asia-Pacific region reports that encryption operations are slower than in other regions. They also notice that some decryption requests for data encrypted with a key that was rotated in the primary region are failing with 'key version not found' errors. The transit key is named 'fin-key' and has been rotated three times. The Asia-Pacific cluster is up-to-date with replication according to the replication status dashboard. Which action should the operations team take to resolve the decryption failures?
⚠ Common exam trap
HashiCorp often tests the misconception that replication automatically grants all capabilities, but the trap here is that policy must explicitly allow access to older key versions, and candidates may incorrectly focus on replication health or manual key copying instead.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Verify that the policy in the Asia-Pacific cluster grants 'decrypt' capability on the key path for older key versions.
The decryption failures are caused by missing key versions in the Asia-Pacific cluster's transit engine. Even though performance replication synchronizes transit keys, older key versions may not be replicated if the transit engine's key version caching or policy does not explicitly grant access to them. Verifying that the policy includes 'decrypt' capability on the key path for older key versions ensures that the cluster can serve decryption requests for data encrypted with rotated keys.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Verify that the policy in the Asia-Pacific cluster grants 'decrypt' capability on the key path for older key versions.
Why this is correct
Policy might be missing decrypt on older versions.
- ✗
Increase the performance standby count in the Asia-Pacific cluster.
Why it's wrong here
Addresses performance, not decryption errors.
- ✗
Manually copy the key material from the primary to the secondary cluster.
Why it's wrong here
Replication should handle this.
- ✗
Re-encrypt all data encrypted with version 1 of 'fin-key' using the current version.
Why it's wrong here
Re-encryption doesn't address missing key version.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This VA-003 practice question is part of Courseiva's free HashiCorp certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the VA-003 exam.