Encryption keys are vital to maintaining your company’s security, reputation, and well-being. Don’t let these 5 key management challenges lock you out.
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. The “security by obscurity” obfuscation method involves concealing details of encryption algorithms to make them harder for threat actors to crack, but it often relies on the use of weak cryptography. Once the secrets of the algorithm’s implementation are discovered (as they often are), systems using these algorithms become vulnerable to attack. That’s why, according to Kerckhoffs’s Principle, the only secret element of an encryption algorithm should be the key itself. Encryption keys are a fundamental component of the security of cryptographic systems and should be strongly protected. In order to properly protect your encryption key, you’ll need a key management system. Designing and implementing a secure and usable key management system requires a clear understanding of how the system could go wrong. Here are the five most common challenges companies face when designing an encryption key management system. The security of encryption keys is vital to the confidentiality of the data that they protect. A threat actor with access to keys can read sensitive data and potentially even generate valid signatures for false or modified records. It’s not uncommon for enterprises to place their encryption keys at risk by putting excessively restrictive permissions on employee access, which makes the data secure but inaccessible, or, more likely, storing encryption keys in a way that makes them convenient and easy to access, which makes the system vulnerable to threat actors. Managing keys in a secure way is extremely complex, especially when doing so across dozens or hundreds of applications. In order to minimize the impact on product schedules (and the dev team’s anxiety levels), control over certain key management settings or requirements is put in the hands of the customers.
