Postbank to replace 12M bank cards after employees steal 'master key'

Re:Postbank to replace 12M bank cards after employees steal ... by m4rtink on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @12:50PM (#23553589)

What surprises me is that you can extract the private key at all - I would expect it to be firmly inside a HSM, that only accepts signing requests and the key never leaves the module & the HSM wipes the key if it detects tampering (there is usually a battery inside to power the tampering detection even if the device is not plugged in).

So just exporting the private key so easily without some pretty involved hight-tech HSM key extraction sounds insane.

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Re:Postbank to replace 12M bank cards after employees steal ... by closeparen on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @01:24PM (#23554049)

I worked on a new internal PKI, nothing as high stakes as banking, but we did have a security consultant who had been around the block. We did, of course, purchase such HSMs and design a signing ceremony. But in his opinion it was also normal and expected to keep a decryptable copy of the private key, in case of e.g. changing HSM vendors. It would be even less accessible, but it would exist.

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Re:Postbank to replace 12M bank cards after employees steal ... by m4rtink on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @02:03PM (#23554559)

That's a good point - I guess if you know what you are doing then I guess it's fine.

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Re:Postbank to replace 12M bank cards after employees steal ... by brohee on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @02:34PM (#23554978)

One article said they key was left in clear on a laptop, so maybe a HSM migration was involved.

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