Ask HN: How do you manage your private keys?

Re:Ask HN: How do you manage your private keys? by spartas on Monday September 23, 2019 @05:54PM (#21054165)

Don't copy your keys. Don't manage or "organize" your keys. Don't share your keys.

The leaky abstractions around what you're doing with keys is a security illusion, and you need to stop.

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Re:Ask HN: How do you manage your private keys? by kickopotomus on Monday September 23, 2019 @06:29PM (#21054442)

This is a pretty good example of a useless comment. Telling the person to simply stop doing what they are currently doing is not a solution. Perhaps, instead, you could offer a different way to handle the situation outlined by the question.

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Re:Ask HN: How do you manage your private keys? by spartas on Monday September 23, 2019 @07:13PM (#21054774)

Sorry.

Generate new keys for each service, device, client, and server. Don't share them. Don't copy them.

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Re:Ask HN: How do you manage your private keys? by aeternum on Monday September 23, 2019 @08:05PM (#21055128)

This still isn't very useful. Suppose you have a database, and an elastic number of workers that need to connect.

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Re:Ask HN: How do you manage your private keys? by nabdab on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @01:52AM (#21056937)

Still good advice. Generate a keypair on each new machine and only ever move around public keys.

If you are copying over private keys to connect, or reusing private keys, you are doing something wrong.

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Re:Ask HN: How do you manage your private keys? by spartas on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @07:47AM (#21058928)

The most common weak security point in any system is people. If you are sharing keys and you ever need to revoke a shared key, you're in for a bad time

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