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VAULT-ASSOCIATE-002 · Question #100

To encrypt your secret with the transit secrets engine, you must send the Base32-encoded plaintext to Vault.

The correct answer is B. False. It is false that the Vault transit secrets engine requires Base32-encoded plaintext for encryption; it accepts raw plaintext and typically returns ciphertext in Base64 encoding.

Submitted by renata2k· Apr 18, 2026Operate Vault

Question

To encrypt your secret with the transit secrets engine, you must send the Base32-encoded plaintext to Vault.

Options

  • ATrue
  • BFalse

How the community answered

(28 responses)
  • A
    7% (2)
  • B
    93% (26)

Why each option

It is false that the Vault transit secrets engine requires Base32-encoded plaintext for encryption; it accepts raw plaintext and typically returns ciphertext in Base64 encoding.

ATrue

True. This is incorrect because the transit secrets engine's `/encrypt` endpoint specifically takes a `plaintext` field which should contain the raw, unencoded data to be encrypted, not pre-encoded Base32.

BFalseCorrect

False. The Vault transit secrets engine expects raw plaintext data directly as input to its `/encrypt` endpoint, typically provided in a `plaintext` field. While the output of the encryption operation is commonly Base64-encoded ciphertext, the input plaintext itself does not need to be pre-encoded by the user in Base32 or any other format.

Concept tested: Vault Transit secrets engine plaintext encryption input

Source: https://developer.hashicorp.com/vault/api-docs/secrets/transit#encrypt-data

Topics

#Transit Secrets Engine#Encryption#Data Encoding#Vault API

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