What is difference between Keys and Secrets in Azure Key Vault?

azure azure-keyvault
Bohdan picture Bohdan · Jul 9, 2016 · Viewed 17.2k times · Source

It would be great to know

  • what are they,
  • what are they used for
  • why would one prefer one versus the other.

Answer

Bishoy picture Bishoy · Jul 9, 2016

A very simple answer:

Key

A Cryptographic key represented as JWK (JSON Web Key)

Example: store A .pfx certificate file that contains a pair of public & private keys

Secret

KV accepts any value and stores it as a binary (there is a max size limitation)

Example: A password or API key

Further Reading

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