Re: HSM outage causes root CA key loss

Jeffrey I. Schiller j...@mit.edu writes: Because of prior experience with a SafeKeyper(tm) (a very large HSM), I learned that when the only copy of your key is in an HSM, the HSM vendor really owns you key, or at least they own you! I thought the Safekeypers had a cloning mechanism (as do things

Re: HSM outage causes root CA key loss

Nicolas Williams nicolas.willi...@sun.com writes: This goes to show that we do need a TA distribution protocol (not for the web, mind you), and it needs to use PKI -- a distinct, but related PKI. ... and now you have two (probably unsolveable) problems instead of one. In addition because

Re: HSM outage causes root CA key loss

Jeffrey I. Schiller j...@mit.edu writes: Our current Server CA certificate will expire in 2026 (when hopefully it won't be my problem!). Thus the universal CA root cert lifetime policy, the lifetime of a CA root certificate is the time till retirement of the person in charge at its creation,

RE: HSM outage causes root CA key loss

Hi, Our current Server CA certificate will expire in 2026 (when hopefully it won't be my problem!). Thus the universal CA root cert lifetime policy, the lifetime of a CA root certificate is the time till retirement of the person in charge at its creation, plus five years :-). This neglects the

HSM outage causes root CA key loss

I haven't been able to find an English version of this, but the following news item from Germany: http://www.heise.de/security/E-Gesundheitskarte-Datenverlust-mit-Folgen--/news/meldung/141864 reports that the PKI for their electronic health card has just run into trouble: they were storing the

Re: HSM outage causes root CA key loss

http://www.heise.de/security/E-Gesundheitskarte-Datenverlust-mit-Folgen--/news/meldung/141864 reports that the PKI for their electronic health card has just run into trouble: they were storing the root CA key in an HSM, which failed. They now have a PKI with no CA key for signing new certs or

Re: HSM outage causes root CA key loss

- Peter Gutmann pgut...@cs.auckland.ac.nz wrote: I haven't been able to find an English version of this, but the following news item from Germany: ... It is exactly for this reason that when we generated the root key for the U.S. Higher Education PKI we did it outside of an HSM and then

Re: HSM outage causes root CA key loss

At 5:58 PM +1200 7/13/09, Peter Gutmann wrote: I haven't been able to find an English version of this, but the following news item from Germany: http://www.heise.de/security/E-Gesundheitskarte-Datenverlust-mit-Folgen--/news/meldung/141864

RE: HSM outage causes root CA key loss

Hi, reports that the PKI for their electronic health card has just run into trouble: they were storing the root CA key in an HSM, which failed. They now have a PKI with no CA key for signing new certs or revoking existing ones. Suppose this happens in a production environment of some CA

RE: HSM outage causes root CA key loss

At 11:09 PM +0200 7/14/09, Weger, B.M.M. de wrote: Any other problems? Maybe something with key rollover or interoperability? Bingo. Key rollover has been thinly tested in relying parties. --Paul Hoffman, Director --VPN Consortium

Re: HSM outage causes root CA key loss

On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 11:09:41PM +0200, Weger, B.M.M. de wrote: Suppose this happens in a production environment of some CA (root or not), how big a problem is this? I can see two issues: - they have to build a new CA and distribute its certificate to all users, which is annoying and maybe

Re: HSM outage causes root CA key loss

Weger, B.M.M. de wrote: - if they rely on the CA for signing CRLs (or whatever revocation mechanism they're using) then they have to find some other way to revoke existing certificates. ... Seems to me that for signing CRLs it's better to have a separate Revocation Authority (whose