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Ask HN: How does your company manage its encryption keys?

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Re: Ask HN: How does your company manage its encryption keys?

#151
We use vault, but sometimes I just `openssl` gpg encrypt the secrets with the keys of all the members of my team and commit the .gpg to git. We all use yubikeys and use them to SSH.

Not ideal, but it works... At least until one of us resign (but turnover is quite low here, so crossed fingers).

Re: Ask HN: How does your company manage its encryption keys?

#153
post #94
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We don't have SSH keys because it's not the 90's and we don't have servers. This seems unnecessarily snarky. There are lots of businesses in 2020 that still maintain their own servers, use ssh keys, and are staffed by admins and developers who very much know what they are doing (and are not at all "behind the times", as this comment seems to imply such businesses are). If that's not what you meant, well, OK, but I…

He'll learn... probably the hard way.

Or the expensive way

Re: Ask HN: How does your company manage its encryption keys?

#154
post #151

We use vault, but sometimes I just `openssl` gpg encrypt the secrets with the keys of all the members of my team and commit the .gpg to git. We all use yubikeys and use them to SSH. Not ideal, but it works... At least until one of us resign (but turnover is quite low here, so crossed fingers).

You should be able to revoke the leaver's shared key from the keyring and reencrypt the secrets?

Re: Ask HN: How does your company manage its encryption keys?

#155
post #151

We use vault, but sometimes I just `openssl` gpg encrypt the secrets with the keys of all the members of my team and commit the .gpg to git. We all use yubikeys and use them to SSH. Not ideal, but it works... At least until one of us resign (but turnover is quite low here, so crossed fingers).

What is your process for handling key exchange with team members?

Re: Ask HN: How does your company manage its encryption keys?

#156

We use Bitwarden[0] for our secrets. It's open-source with a hosted option. Makes sharing passwords and keys across the team pretty straightforward. In addition to it, we use envwarden[1], which is a simple open-source wrapper around the Bitwarden CLI to manage our server secrets. It's super simple, but does the job for us well. We can then manage both passwords and keys in one place. Disclaimer: I created envwarden.…

envwarden looks awesome! Is there any potential for the Bitwarden project to incorporate it/make it officially supported?

Re: Ask HN: How does your company manage its encryption keys?

#157

I try to push as much to certificate auth as possible. Internal CA keys are stored on an offline USB HSM, which is locked in a cabinet. Access to the key requires 2/10 individuals to be physically present. There are different CAs for different purposes. There's an intermediate for device management, and another for user or service auth purposes.

So are your secrets served from a central node that authenticates the certificates? What does your process look like for changing secrets when someone leaves the company?

Re: Ask HN: How does your company manage its encryption keys?

#158

Someone at my company generated the keys. They then put them on a network share without any security restrictions. They've been there for 5 years with no rotation. At least 2 are checked into source control.

That's smart! At least the secret is now versioned, cool!

Re: Ask HN: How does your company manage its encryption keys?

#159

We use Azure KeyVault

+1 Worth noting accessible using api via REST https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/keyvault/ and powershell https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/key-vault/secrets/qui...

+1 for Az KeyVault. I use it in my Docker deployment scripts using Azure CLI. Example here is a secret, but similar concept for certs using CLI: STORAGE_ACCOUNT_KEY=`az keyvault secret show --vault-name= --name= --query=value | tr -d "\""` This populates a .env file, referenced in Docker-compose.yml.

Re: Ask HN: How does your company manage its encryption keys?

#160
I've had these variations at work: Checked into the code encrypted, a custom secret vault, stored encrypted in a S3 bucket and downloaded/decrypted at startup.

The main observation I'd make that if you put your keys somewhere only accessible in production, you've made it impossible to test anywhere except production. If you do that, you need to create a process where people can ship some small bit of code to test if the production key setup genuinely works (hint: it won't).

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