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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?

#201

Post by Fr33maan »

tempestn wrote: post #177
eitland wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hehe. Less than 8 years ago I asked for help to add a column in a database at a company I helped. This was a few days after they met me for the first time. The company solved this by giving me a root username and password that worked on every single important database in the company, at least every customer database. I had to beg them to create a somewhat restricted account. The same company was however deeply scepti…

With root access I suppose you could have created a restricted account yourself!

I laughed so much at this

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

#202

Post by tomschlick »

kelnos wrote: post #192
techsupporter wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does "really secure" mean "find a bank that still offers safety deposit boxes"? Realistically? Yes. This is what several of the companies I've done contract work for have done. You can still find at least one bank or self-storage place (look for the ones that don't have a nationally-advertised brand and don't look like they're made entirely out of corrugated metal) that do regular safety deposit boxes in pretty muc…

One problem with a safe deposit box is what happens if things go to hell at 2am? The bank isn't going to open for another 6 or 7 hours, and meanwhile you're sitting there with possibly business-destroying downtime.

Well the idea is that the safety deposit box key is if everything falls apart, all the employees go missing and you dont have any other options. Ideally multiple employees would have keys as well that could respond in those crucial hours.

But if for instance, your whole security team got in a car accident and all the keys burned up, you'd have a way to recover the creds and save the business.

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

#203

Post by zmmmmm »

We check many of our passwords into a git repository ... but they are all encrypted with unix pass with the public key of each individual in the team authorised to access. Our services require the gpg agent running to launch, allowing them to read the secrets.

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

#204

Post by a1369209993 »

jbn wrote: post #166
thieving_magpie wrote: post #14

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.

This would be hilarious if it were not so telling about the state of security in general (not at this company in particular, i'm certain many if not most companies do the same...).

It's still hilarious; it just takes a certain level of bitterness and cynicism to appreciate.

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

#205

Post by tomschlick »

closeparen wrote: post #149
openfinch wrote: post #9

Can't speak to my current employer as it's above my pay-grade to know, but at Job-1 we did the following: - All "hot" keys were stored in an offline credential manager in specific vaults depending on who needed access to them. Only staff with actual clearance could request temporary access to a vault (fully background checked, 1 year employment, etc). - Copies of each vaulth and our master CA cert were written to 4 e…

How did you handle new secrets / rotations? Seems like a lot to keep in sync. Seems like we hear more frequently about the actual secrets being stored encrypted (potentially with hardware protection) in a central place, and only the keys to unlock them being distributed like this.

Not OP, but generally you wouldnt distribute the actual passphrases to the people who keep hard copy backups. You'd distribute the key to unlock the key. That way you could rotate the actual key and you just re-encrypt it with the secrets you already distributed.

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

#206

Post by a1369209993 »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #95
dijit wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

aha, sounds fair. I don't judge too harshly- anyone who has black and white principles on these matters has never worked in any other industry most likely... all you can do is your best to steer the ship and convey the downsides. I think it's important too because it helps us understand how much friction people will tolerate. In many cases, even a small amount of friction will cause people to stop functioning complet…

One thing i have noticed is that “security conscious” people are very good at criticizing things and pointing out flaws. But they are not as good at proposing clear and workable solutions that don’t add huge burden to users. It should be no surprise that people do insecure stuff under deadline pressure.

> are very good at criticizing things [but] not as good at proposing clear and workable solutions

This is definitely true, but not actually surprising. It's much easier to notice that, say, a violin performance or plumbing repair is done very badly, than it is to actually do it correctly yourself.

Which also leads to a great deal of exasperation when people (either apparently or actually) don't even notice that what they're doing is insecure. There's a big difference between "yeah, it's broken, but it'd be a huge pain to fix and we'd probably get it wrong anyway, so we'd rather take our chances" versus "there is no problem".

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

#208

Post by [deleted] »

greyhair wrote: post #183
varikin wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

We also use an HSM. 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 ke…

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