181–190 of 246 posts
One threat model might be: Burglars sneaking in during the night and stealing the hard drivers. Then you would store the keys on a different location then the disks.
Then you make it a routine to reboot parts of the fleet, like scheduled simulation/training so that everyone knows what to do when you actually need them.
Locked in a vault.
Keys are an actual secret key (within the HSM), unknown to any human.
Two people with two different access cards have to be present to enable key operations.
So, you don't have to worry about changing keys as employees come and go, because no one knows the actual keys.
There is a whole structure of spare cards stored in offsite secure storage in case a card is damaged, lost, or stolen.
Card set one is stored separately from card set two.
https://www.vaultproject.io/ We use Hashicorp's Vault product to manage SSH credentials, TLS certificates, as well as application secrets across thousands of users, tens of thousands of virtual machines, and hundreds of applications. We pay for the enterprise version, but the free version is more than capable for most needs. Avoid a password manager if you can, it leads to poor security practices and availability iss…
This just pushed the problem further down the stack. You should have keys to unlock vault when it is restarted. How do you secure those keys?
Smart cards are held by two separate people, each card set is different. Both have to be present to restart the HSM.
Our HSM can require up to five different cards be required for certain operations.
For us, we only require two for normal operations.
For HSM management (key generation, card authentication, etc..) we require a third card set member to be present. This protects against accidental key erasure, or fraud.
We use Azure KeyVault
Disclosure: Founder https://dev.ionic.com Utilized globally by individual developers, large enterprises such as JP Morgan & Chase[1], and integrated into the KMS services such as Google Cloud[2]. 1. https://venturebeat.com/2019/02/27/ionic-security-raises-40-... 2. https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/clo...
dev.ionic.com is in particular an answer to, "how do you back up your encryption keys, or even put them in escrow somewhere?"
Signing and authentication keys are expendable but encryption keys are worth keeping even after they've been rotated since decryption of existing data may be necessary.
The key can be printed on paper and stored in a physical safe. Paper isn't a high density storage medium but it is remarkably durable and perfect for small amounts of data such as encryption keys. It also counts as an offline backup.
Keys can also be printed as QR codes. They support error correction and enable automatic data restoration. Even 4096 bit RSA keys fit in a binary mode QR code and the smaller ECC keys allow use of high error correction modes, making the data even more durable.
I wrote a binary decoding feature for ZBar in order to support this exact use case:
zbarcam --raw --oneshot -Sbinary > key
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On one my past job there were fingerprint reader system on enter to office. Almost 6 years later, I were still able to enter office with my fingerprint.
At one of my past jobs there was a fingerprint reader system to enter the office. It didn't work reliably to recognise fingerprints of employees, so after a while people settled on the solution of having a large brick next to the door which was used to wedge the door open during the daytime after the first person managed to get the door open in the morning.