Townsend Security Data Privacy Blog

Excerpt from the White Paper "MySQL & VMware - Encryption and Key Management for Developers."

Whether you develop mostly on Linux or Windows, you can achieve a compliant implementation of encryption with the MySQL database and variations of MySQL like MariaDB. This blog looks at some key decisions you will need to make about the encryption approach, and how we help our customers get encryption right.

Using the MySQL Built-in Encryption Primitives

MySQL supports a number of encryption and encoding operations directly from the SQL language. When encrypting a column you can use the ENCRYPT function, AES_ ENCRYPT function, the older DES_ENCRYPT function, or the encoding or compression algorithms. If you want to use this approach to encryption and decryption, I would recommend that you use AES_ENCRYPT and AES_DECRYPT. For this, primitive MySQL uses the industry standard 128-bit AES algorithm, which is considered strong encryption and meets compliance regulations.

While the DES_ENCRYPT support is still a part of recognized industry standards, you will have a performance benefit when using the stronger 128-bit AES support and are not likely to run into the problem of a future deprecation of the Triple DES algorithm used by the MySQL DES_ENCRYPT method.

Here is an example of a MySQL insert statement that uses AES_ENCRYPT with a hex representation of the encryption key:

INSERT INTO t
VALUES (1,AES_ENCRYPT(‘text’,UNHEX(‘F3229
A0B371ED2D9441B830D21A390C3’)));

Of course, hard-coding the encryption key is poor security practice.

Encryption at the Application Layer

Encrypting and decrypting directly in your SQL statements is not always possible or optimal. Don’t worry, you can also implement encryption in your application code if that makes more sense. Our Alliance Key Manager includes several language-specific software libraries for developers. For example, if you are a Java developer you can install and use our Java .jar files for full support for encryption key retrieval and on-device encryption. If you are a Windows C# developer you can add our Windows .NET Client to your Visual Studio project and have full support for key management. Both Java and C# have great support for encryption - you won’t need support from third parties for AES encryption - but you will need to implement encryption key management the right way.

What are some reasons you might want to do encryption at the application layer?

• Minimize the changes to SQL for different databases.
• Take advantage of the stronger 256-bit AES encryption method.
• Use an AES mode of encryption that uses an Initialization Vector such as Cipher Block Chaining (CBC) mode.
• Embed information in the encrypted field about the key used, the version of the key, and the IV.
• Create custom logic for encrypting larger blobs in the database.

Whatever the reason or combination of reasons, implementing encryption at the application layer is an easy choice to make with the Alliance Key Manager language SDKs.

Where are the Encryption Keys?

The single biggest challenge a developer will face when deploying encryption for MySQL is how to properly manage encryption keys. Not getting it right leaves the organization open to security failures, audit failures, and litigation. Here are some ways NOT TO STORE encryption keys:

• As a part of the SQL statement (see above).
• In the application code.
• In a file on the same server.
• In a file on a separate server.
• In a separate table in the MySQL database.

All of these approaches have been the cause of security audit failures for our customers. Don’t let this happen to you.

Summary

Developers are the tip-of-the-spear when it comes to protecting their organizations from data breaches. When they are aware of the critical success factors for an encryption strategy they can dramatically improve the overall security posture of their companies.

At Townsend Security we provide developers with the tools they need to be successful and to get encryption right. Our key management solution, Alliance Key Manager, runs in all of the platform environments that developers need. The applications and software development kits that come with Alliance Key Manager run in VMware, the cloud and everywhere else you might deploy the MySQL database.

Data-centric security means planning for and implementing encryption and the proper management of encryption keys regardless of the environment.

All data security plans should constantly evolve to reflect changes in business and compliance regulations, as well as policy and infrastructure changes. Because of this evolution, developers are often called upon to modify existing applications, and to implement new or better security solutions. They also are often required to add new security applications in order to meet data protection best practices or prepare for an audit to meet compliance requirements (PCI DSS, HIPAA, FFIEC, etc.).  

What do developers need to know about coding for compliance?

From the ground up, regardless of the platform or language you use, it is the data security mindset that is critical. Developers need to be aware of protecting sensitive data when writing code because ever-evolving compliance requirements call for that disposition. There should be an emphasis to meet industry compliance standards from the beginning design stages. Code needs to be built with those data protection requirements in mind so that is doesn’t have to be reengineered. Projects can sink or fail due to inadequate data security measures, which can put a whole organization at risk.

Whether you are working in hardware, virtual, or cloud environments, understanding and identifying where sensitive data will reside is very important from day one. There needs to be an understanding of the criminal mindsets that will be trying to breach the systems you create, proper preparation for security audits, and a full knowledge of the compliance guidance available to meet industry standards. Developers should also develop for every possible platform/application that the project might be deployed on. As applications move more to multi-tenant cloud environments, you want to make sure you are not locked into or out of a particular platform. You want your code to be compatible from day one with hardware, VMware virtual environments, and cloud platforms. As more organizations move away from using only hardware, VMware technology is at the center of a revolution around virtual and cloud environments. VMware (the company) has done a great job with providing educational materials, helping developers program in a compliance fashion, and producing reference architecture for PCI compliance.

As developers know, their customers want “out of the box” third-party solutions that already meet required security validations. A few of the fundamental basics to keep in mind when developing for data security compliance:

• Use encryption standards such as AES encryption for data-at-rest.
• Use proper Encryption Key storage and management tools
• Do not burn the keys in code
• Do not store keys on the same server as the protected data
• Plan for a compliance audit from the beginning stages

It is also important to look for solution providers that will talk with you before just giving you an instant trial download, it is a good idea to make sure their solution is a technical fit, and not a waste of your time. This is something we do here at Townsend Security with all of our products. We offer a 30-day full version trial of all our software so that you can do a full proof-of-concept and test in your environment. We also feel it is important to supply client-side applications, SDK’s and modules that fit naturally into the platforms and languages that match your development environment. I encourage you to take a little time to listen to this podcast and hear from Patrick Townsend, the Founder & CEO of Townsend Security, on his perspective for developers.

"This article was originally posted on Pantheon’s blog. Pantheon is a website management platform for Drupal and WordPress."

To keep something safe, you protect it under lock and key, right? Same is true in Drupal and WordPress. Except in these CMSs, that key is unfortunately often hidden under the “Welcome” mat called your database. Not always a very secure place for such important items. So, the question is, what can you do to keep the key safe?

Let’s back up a few steps. Why are there keys and where are they in the first place? 

Private API Keys

Private API keys are actually used frequently within a CMS by services like Authorize.net, PayPal, MailChimp, etc., and stored in the clear. If your site gets hacked, so does access to the services that you have integrated into your site. For example, if your Amazon S3 API key were in your stolen database, hackers would have access to your entire offsite S3 storage. Let’s take MailChimp, for example:  If your MailChimp API key becomes compromised, hackers could send out emails as if they appeared from you, leaving customers surprised to learn that you just got into selling Viagra.

Encryption Keys

In Drupal, for example, there are several modules (Encrypt, Field Encryption, Encrypted Files, etc.) that allow you to encrypt various types of data. This is a very necessary step to keeping your data secure, however what happens to the key to unlock that data? Typically, developers will store their encryption keys locally in either a file protected on the server, in the database, or in Drupal’s settings file. Not very secure places. Further, for companies who fall under data security compliance requirements like HIPAA, FISMA, or PCI DSS, key management requirements are pretty clearly spelled out, and these default methods don’t even come close to being sufficient. Essentially, the compliance requirements all say the same thing: encryption keys should never reside in the same environment or server as the encrypted data. This is a technical way of saying, don’t leave your key under the doormat a hacker walks in over.

Unfortunately in WordPress, there are isolated solutions, but no plugin that provides and manages the encryption process. The team working on the Drupal encryption modules are also working to bring the same functionality to WordPress.

Now that we have established storing sensitive keys within the CMS is not secure, what should we do with them?

Key Management

Keys need to be stored outside of the CMS and developers need to consider how they’ll manage all of these keys. Most encryption modules are designed to create a new key each time the encrypted data is accessed and re-encrypted. As you can imagine, versions of keys add up quickly and managing them is quite a task—not something that you’d want to do manually (luckily your server can’t put a sticky note of keys on its hard-drive).

There are solutions and services designed specifically for key management that can run on a wide variety of platforms ranging from in the cloud, to VMware, to a physical hardware security module (HSM). These solutions can safeguard your API keys, as well as manage encryption keys through the entire lifecycle—from creation to destruction.  Additionally, an external key manager will allow for:

• Key naming and versioning

• Key change and rotation

• Secure key retrieval

• Key mirroring

• Key import and export

• Password and passphrase protection

• User and group control for key access

Modules and Plugins for Key Management

Luckily, for Drupal users, there is a super easy way to integrate external key management (and follow security best practices). This can happen by way of the “Key” module. Key acts as a central routing API for keys and is easily extended to integrate with your key management vendor of choice.

These modules act as the bridge between the various encryption/API modules and an external key manager. They give site administrators the ability to define how keys are stored, which provides an increased level of security and allows sites to meet compliance requirements and security best practices. With these modules installed, users no longer need to settle for storing their keys in insecure places.

While there currently isn’t a Key equivalent for WordPress, efforts are being made to remedy this.  By early 2016, we can expect to see great progress in the way of managing encryption and API keys in via a plugin similar to that in the Drupal environment.  For now, WordPress developers need to rely on an  external service such asLockr to secure these keys.

Who Holds the Keys to Your Kingdom?

There are three important questions that need to be asked when considering your key management strategy:

1. Do I want to manage the keys myself or use a service?

2. Do I need to meet any compliance requirements?  

3. What is my budget?

Your budget and needs can play a large part in determining which route you take. With a low entry price point, a multi-tenant managed key service (where your keys are stored alongside other companies’ keys on the same key manager) is a great option. These services typically operate in the cloud and allow businesses to remove their keys from under the “Welcome” mat and store them in a more secure environment. As businesses or security needs grow, managed key services can easily scale and migrate users to a dedicated, FIPS 140-2 compliant key manager that can help them meet compliance (PCI DSS, FISMA, etc.).

For users who feel more comfortable with a hands-on approach—or don’t trust anyone but themselves with their keys)—a dedicated and self-managed option may be right for them. Dedicated key managers are available virtually (AWS, Azure, VMware) or physically as a Cloud HSM or HSM, and have a wide variety of licensing options.

To Key or Not to Key?

By now the choice should be fairly obvious. Protecting keys is an important aspect of  a strong security posture. As the headlines show, data breaches are a reality—regardless of the size of your business. They can happen as a result of a hacker or disgruntled employee.  Properly protecting API and encryption keys is a very easy way to manage the risk and severity of a data breach.

Townsend Security’s dedicated Alliance Key Manager is in use by over 3,000 customers worldwide and is the only dedicated key manager with Drupal integrations. Cellar Door Media also recently launched Lockr, a managed key service for Drupal and WordPress that’s free during development, and once deployed to a site, pricing starts at $30 per month. Lockr also offers managed dedicated key service for enterprise customers.

2015 was a year of large and sometimes very controversial data breaches across a broad industry spectrum.  The Identity Theft Resource Center 2015 Breach List contains 780 breaches and 177,866,236 exposed records. Here are just a few that everyone should be aware of:

HEALTHCARE

Anthem

• 78.8 million highly sensitive patient records
• 8.8 to 18.8 million non-patient records
• Names, birth dates, Social Security numbers, addresses, employment information, and income data

Premera

• Over 11 million subscribers
• Names, birth dates, Social Security numbers, member identification numbers, and bank account information.

Excellus

• 10 million members
• Names, birth dates, Social Security numbers, member identification numbers, financial account information, and claims information

ENTERTAINMENT

Avid Life Media (ALM), the parent company of Ashley Madison

• 37 million user accounts
• Email addresses, first and last names, and phone numbers.

VTech

• 6.4 million children accounts
• 4.9 million customer (parent) accounts
• Photos, names, passwords, IP addresses, download history, and children’s gender and birth dates.

Hello Kitty (SanrioTown)

• 3.3 million customers, including children
• Full names, encoded by decipherable birth dates, email addresses, and encrypted passwords, along with password reset questions and answers.

TECHNOLOGY

T-Mobile via Experian

• 15 million records
• Names, birth dates, addresses and social security numbers and/or an alternative form of ID, such as drivers’ license numbers. (This was an unusual hack because the company itself (in this case T-mobile) didn’t have a data breach rather Experian (a credit reporting company) had a data breach which leaked T-mobile’s consumers’ data)

TalkTalk

• 3 breaches affecting up to 4 million user records
• Names, addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers, email addresses, TalkTalk account details and payment card information

Comcast

• Over 200,000 users
• Login credentials were sold on the dark web

GOVERNMENT

Office of Personnel Management (OPM)

• Over 4 million personnel files
• Over 21 million federal employees and contractors
• Social Security numbers, security clearance information, fingerprints, and personal details that could leave federal personnel vulnerable to blackmail.

Internal Revenue Service (IRS)

• Over 100,000 taxpayers
• Online transcripts and significant personal information was accessed as a result of access to previously stolen identity information.

Wrapping up the year; on December 20th, 191 million registered U.S. voter records were exposed online. The database that was discovered contained more than the voter’s name, date of birth, gender, and address; which on their own is a good amount of personally identifiable information (PII). It also include the voter’s ethnicity, party affiliation, e-mail address, phone number, state voter ID, and whether he/she is on the “Do Not Call” list.

As we head into 2016, we will be focused on prevention and how we can best provide information and solutions to protect your sensitive & valuable data.

Let us know how we can help you!

It seems like every week I talk to a new Microsoft Windows customer who has just failed a security audit because they are not handling encryption keys correctly in their Microsoft applications. I hear an assortment of descriptions like this:

We’re doing encryption, but the encryption key is stored in a table in the database.

We’re doing encryption, but the key is burned in our C# code.

We’re doing encryption, but the key is stored in a flat file protected with a password.

We’re doing encryption, but our encryption key is weak - it’s just a password

These Microsoft customers are trying to do the right thing when it comes to encrypting sensitive data, they just did not get the proper security controls in place for the encryption keys. And this is understandable, Microsoft does not provide very good guidance in this area, and it is probably the area where most organizations fail to get encryption right. When you do encryption, using strong encryption keys and protecting them properly is the hardest part.

You’ve made a big investment in your application built on the Microsoft C# .NET architecture, so what do you do now?

It turns out that it is not difficult to remediate this problem. You need a few things:

• A good key manager built and certified to industry standards.
• A Windows software library that is friendly to your C# application.
• A developer who can implement some simple methods for key management.

Let’s look at how we help our customers solve these three challenges:

1) A key manager is easy. Our Alliance Key Manager solution is an easy-to-install and configure key management solution that runs as a Cloud instance (AWS, Azure), as a VMware virtual machine, as a network-attached hardware security module (HSM), or as a dedicated Cloud HSM. It configures in a few seconds and you have a fully functional, dedicated, FIPS 140-2 compliant key management solution. It even automatically creates unique encryption keys for you on the first boot.

2) The second thing you need is a good Windows .NET software library that makes retrieving the encryption key seamless. We provide that at no charge in the form of our Windows .NET Client. It installs on Windows in the usual way and is ready to add to your Visual Studio project. The Windows .NET Client software DLL handles all of the complexities for you. It makes the authenticated connection to the key server, audits all key retrieval activity, and caches the key for the best performance. Sample C# code shows you exactly how to do key retrieval from your code and is easy to implement.

3) The third thing you need is a good developer. With over 2 million Windows developers out there it is not hard to find one. Maybe this is you? Making the code change to incorporate key retrieval with Alliance Key Manager’s Windows .NET Client is really simple in C#. You just remove the logic of the burned in key or the logic to retrieve it from a file, add the Alliance Key Manager Windows .NET Client to your Visual Studio project, and put in code that looks something like this (see the sample code for the complete picture):

// Load the data to be encrypted
 plaintext = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(data);

// Initialize for the client configuration file
 SetClientConfiguration(keyService.ClientConfiguration);

// Retrieve the encryption key from the key server
 key = keyService.GetSymmetricKey(keyName, instance);

// Perform encryption
 using (var algorithm = new RijndaelManaged())
 {
 algorithm.Key = key.KeyBytes();

using (var encryptor = algorithm.CreateEncryptor())
 {
 ciphertext = encryptor.TransformFinalBlock(plaintext, 0,
plaintext.Length);
 }
 }

// Display the ciphertext (you would probably save it in a database)
 Console.WriteLine("ciphertext: " + BitConverter.ToString(ciphertext));

The Alliance Key Manager Windows .NET Client code handles a lot of issues for you. Here are just a few:

Authentication
The Windows .NET Client performs the TLS connection to Alliance Key Manager and handles the full authentication sequence. You get a secure, mutually authenticated TLS connection without needing to handle that in your C# code.

High Availability Failover
You can define one or more Alliance Key Managers in a high availability failover group. If one key manager is not available due to a network failure or a key server failure, the client-side code will automatically use the next available key server. You can define a primary and multiple failover key servers, and you can mix and match cloud, virtual, and HSMs in your key management topology.

Performance
The Alliance Key Manager Windows .NET Client is designed for high performance. It will automatically securely cache encryption keys so that you don’t need to retrieve the keys more than one. If the key has been retrieved before in your current process it will be returned to you without a round-trip communications session with the key server. That gives you maximum performance.

PCI Compliance - Coalfire and PAG
Alliance Key Manager is FIPS 140-2 compliant (certificate 1449) and has been PCI validated by Coalfire, a top-tier QSA auditor. This means that you can achieve very rapid compliance with PCI and other compliance regulations without a lot of fuss. If you are under the gun to fix a compliance failure, you should start with a solution that provably meets the compliance regulation. Alliance Key Manager does exactly that. The PCI Product Applicability Guide is here.

Most C# applications that we see are well-modularized and the encryption logic is in one place, or a very small number of locations in the code. This makes the change to your code easy to make and easy to test. The complexity is handled for you in the Alliance Key Manager Windows .NET Client software.

You can find the Alliance Key Manager Windows .NET Client application on the supplemental download for the product. It is available at no charge and there are no client-side license fees. In addition to the installation package you will find full sample code and documentation.  For interested developers, we also offer a free developer tools.  As always, let us know if you have any questions.

Enjoy.

Patrick

Looking into 2016, what is the role encryption key management will play in securing sensitive data?

Encryption and key management are the Fort Knoxes of security technologies for organizations wanting to protect sensitive data from hackers and data breaches. While commonly used by retail and financial institutions (and gaining even more traction after the onslaught of retail data breaches we saw in 2014), we still see major gaps and problems with implementation of these technologies across multiple industries. In 2015, with over 181 million records exposed in data breaches by mid November, we ask ourselves, what are the challenges of implementing encryption and key management, how widely are they used today, and what can we expect from encryption and key management vendors looking forward?

While encryption has become an easily accessible technology, it remains a major point of struggle for most companies. Since organizations have multiple departments with siloed technical infrastructure, many different tools must be used to manage data across the enterprise. From HR to Accounting to stored customer data, many different platforms, operating systems, databases, and applications are used to store and process sensitive information. This makes locating this data extremely difficult as well as achieving consistent data encryption that can be managed from a single, central location.

Boards of directors and executives are becoming more aware that data security is not just a technical problem, but a governance, risk management, and compliance problem that deserves the same level of attention to risk as financial, legal, and corporate aspects of their business. However, employees at the IT level still hold the most buying influence over encryption and key management technologies.

These sorts of buying decisions have historically landed in the wheelhouse of IT Operations; however, the primary issue that arises in these decisions is that  complicated data security projects are often perceived as a threat to operational continuity. When an IT professional feels they must choose between security and functionality, they will always choose function to avoid the dreaded business-down scenario. Companies should not have to chose between security and continuity, and today, security professionals advocate that executives assign an IT security team to advocate for security solutions and work with IT Operations to implement these technologies.

According to the Ponemon Institute 2015 Global Encryption & Key Management Trends Study, meeting compliance requirements such as PCI-DSS remains the primary driver for encryption and key management implementation. PCI-DSS and federal and financial regulations such as FISMA and GLBA/FFIEC also continue to set the strictest data security regulations. However, despite compliance with industry regulations, organizations still experience breaches, often by a hacker accessing their network through a third party vendor or through employee mistakes. Sadly, often these breaches reveal that data was not encrypted, despite industry compliance.

This flagrant lack of encryption begs the question, will our data security ever get better, or will hackers continue to be one or even two steps ahead?

The answer to that question may come from the fact that in many large corporations, about 80% of resources allocated for data security apply towards network and anti-virus security. This includes firewalls, malware detection, and other intrusion-prevention software. The problem with relying mostly on network security is that hackers continually succeed in breaking through these barriers, often using social engineering and phishing scams to achieve enough authority to open a door and walk right in. Once inside, they discover sensitive data stored in the clear and steal it.

Network security is always an important part of a data security plan, but time after time we see encryption, which is also a critical part of that plan, implemented after-the-fact. This comes back to the issue of sensitive data being difficult to locate inside an enterprise, but the sheer amounts of unencrypted data that hackers are able to discover leads one to believe that some organizations simply do not implement encryption very well. This may be backed up by the discovery that only 37% of companies in the U.S. deploy encryption extensively (as opposed to partially) across their enterprise.

Diving deeper into the challenges surrounding encryption, one of the most painful parts of encrypting data is managing encryption keys. Even if a company encrypts a database of customer credit card numbers, if they do not protect the encryption key, a hacker could easily find the key and decrypt the data, rendering the encryption useless. Unfortunately, protecting and managing encryption keys away from encrypted data is still something organizations fail to do.

As organizations begin to move into the cloud and virtualized environments, as many already have, another stumbling block will be lack of availability of hybrid (cloud and in-house) encryption and key management solutions.

Looking into 2016 and beyond, the key management solutions that will excel will be the solutions that can manage encryption keys anywhere your sensitive data is located whether that be in the cloud, virtual platforms, or hardware. A majority of companies believe that hybrid deployment in both cloud and on-premise is the most important feature of an encryption solution. Without strong hybrid key management, encryption of data spread across an enterprise and the cloud will become even more difficult. Key management vendors that follow their customers into virtual environments will, in the long term, deliver more comprehensive data security.

It’s hard to imagine that data breaches will begin to diminish any time soon, but hopefully organizations will learn from others’ mistakes. It is clear from the evidence that deployment of encryption is nowhere near complete across most organizations, and lack of encryption key management continues to be a challenge, but working with the right encryption key management vendor can ease this pain.

When looking for a key management vendor that can help you manage encryption keys across your enterprise, including the cloud, look for a key management vendor that has:

• No hidden or additional fees for nodes or client-side applications
• Commitment to innovation and development
• Commitment to legacy products
• Excellent reputation for customer support

This is a guest blog by Nick Trenc, CISSP, QSA, PA-QSA, VCP.  Nick is an IT Security Architect at Coalfire Labs.

In any environment where potentially sensitive data is stored using Microsoft’s SQL Server, one of the key issues is how to best protect that data. Microsoft SQL Server does offer several security controls natively, but almost all of them require some sort of extensive configuration and management in order to be done according to security best practices. Additionally, SQL Server’s own security controls do face some shortcomings.

If using SQL Server’s own encryption tools, database encryption keys are stored right next to the data they are used to protect. This makes it easier for would be malicious users to capture both the protected data and the keys used to protect that data.

This is where Townsend Security’s Alliance Key Manager (AKM) comes in to play. Utilizing the built-in SQL support, IT administrators can generate, store, and manage keys within AKM away from the data those keys are used to protect. This enables separation of duties and dual control which are both best practices and requirements of several compliance frameworks.

Alliance Key Manager utilizes the Extensible Key Management (EKM) functionality of SQL Server (Enterprise Edition 2008 and newer) to centrally manage encryption keys. In addition, AKM also includes native support for SQL Server Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) which can be used to encrypt all of the tables within SQL Server. Finally, AKM includes support for SQL Server Cell Level Encryption (sometimes called Column Level Encryption), integrates directly with the Windows Certificate store, and includes features for key caching and mirroring for high availability.

For more information on using AKM to specifically meet PCI DSS compliance within a virtual environment (but also applicable to most environments), please see the VMware Product Applicability Guide for PCI 3.0 published by Coalfire Systems with collaboration with Townsend Security and VMware.

Periodically changing the encryption key for protected data is a security best practice and a part of many compliance regulations like the PCI Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).

This encryption key change is sometimes referred to as “Key rotation” or “Key rollover” and these terms mean the same thing. When performing a key change operation you generate a new encryption key, decrypt the protected data with the old encryption key, and then encrypt the data with the new encryption key. After the defined cryptoperiod for the key you archive or escrow the key and it is no longer be used.

Townsend Security's Alliance Key Manager helps you with key rollover by allowing you to specify a cryptoperiod for any symmetric key, and then automatically generating a new key for you at the end of the cryptoperiod. In Alliance Key Manager the cryptoperiod is specified as the number of days from the key creation date. At midnight on the last day of the cryptoperiod, a new version of the key is created and it becomes the default encryption key. The old key is retained and is fully active so that data can still be decrypted with that key.

Like most enterprise key management solutions Alliance Key Manager provides a user-friendly name for an encryption key, and a version identifier. The key name is a normal character name and might be something like Credit card, Human resources, and so forth. The name is meant to provide an easy way for a user or security administrator to locate and use a key.

In Alliance Key Manager the version of the key is called the “Key instance” and is a unique character string. When managing keys the key instance name might look something like this: TGV0IGZyZWVkb20gcmluZw==. Key instance names are always unique and a key may have any number of key instances.

The most recent version of the key is the default, or current, instance of the key. When you retrieve a key in your application, you can leave the key version blank and you will automatically get the most current version of the key. When Alliance Key Manager performs key rollover the new version of the key becomes the current version of the key.

Alliance Key Manager supports three rollover settings for each symmetric key:

• Automatic key rollover at the interval you specify
• Manual rollover that you initiate through the security console
• No key rollover

Whatever key rollover strategy you decide to implement, Alliance Key Manager will provide the tools you need. You can fully automate key rollover, roll keys manually at your convenience, or dis-allow key rollover so that new versions of the key are never generated.

As a security architect, security administrator or database administrator, one of the first big questions you face with the encryption of data at rest is how to organize, plan, and implement encryption keys to protect that data. Should you use one key for everything? Or, should you use a different key for each application? Or, perhaps you should use a different key for every table and column? Or, should you use a different key for each department? It is hard to find good security best practice guidance on this topic, so let’s put some focus around this question and see if we can come up with some general principles and guidance.

First, I like to start by identifying any applications or databases that contain highly sensitive information such as credit card numbers, social security numbers, or other personally identifiable information. These sources will be the high-value targets of cybercriminals, so you will want to protect them with your best security. For each of these applications and databases, assign encryption keys that are not used by any other application or database, and carefully monitor the use of these keys. Your encryption key management solution should help you with monitoring key usage. The objective is to protect the highly sensitive data and the related encryption keys from unauthorized access. If you have multiple sensitive applications and databases, assign each its own unique key.

Second, identify all of your major applications that are used across a broad set of departments within your company. Since these applications span multiple departments and will have a broad set of users with different needs, you should assign each of these applications their own specific encryption keys. In the event one application or database is compromised, it will not affect all of the other applications and databases.

Third, the remaining applications and databases are probably those that are used by one specific department within your organization. You will probably find that most departments in the organization have a number of specialized applications that help them get their work done. In terms of raw numbers, this might be the largest category of applications. Assign each department its own set of encryption keys that are not used by other departments. You may find that you need to sub-divide the department and assign keys for each sub-group, but the goal is to use encryption keys for the department that are not shared with other departments.

Lastly, cloud implementations are a special category and should always have separate keys. In the event that a Cloud Service Provider experiences a security breach, you will want to be sure that your internal IT systems are not affected. Assign specific encryption keys for your cloud applications and do not share the keys with internal, non-cloud applications.

Over the years I’ve occasionally seen organizations create and use a very large numbers of keys. In one case a unique key was used for every column and row in a table. In another case a different key was used for every credit card transaction. Large numbers of keys present management problems, and probably lowers overall security. Keep the number of encryption keys to a manageable level.

The above guidelines should help you protect your sensitive data and easily manage your encryption keys. There is a summary table for the above guidelines:

There are always exceptions to general rules about how to deploy encryption keys for the best security. The above comments may not be appropriate for your organization, and you should always adjust your approach to your specific implementation. Hopefully the above will be helpful as you start your encryption project.

In this age of “Bring Your Own”, we see the acronyms BYOD (device), BYOE (encryption), and BYOK (key) showing up all over the blog-o-sphere. BYOK is a cloud computing security model that allows cloud service customers to use the provided server-side encryption software and (bring) manage their own encryption keys.

The idea of encryption (cryptography) is almost as old as the concept of written language: if a message might fall into enemy hands, then it is important to ensure that they will not be able to read it. Most typically, encryption relies on some sort of "key" to unlock and make sense of the message it contains, and that transfers the problem of security to a new level – now the message is secure, the focus shifts to protecting the key. In the case of access to cloud services, if we are encrypting data because we are worried about its security in an unknown cloud, then why would we trust the same cloud to hold the keys without using a key management solution?

BYOK can help an organization that wishes to take advantage of cloud services to address both regulatory compliance and data privacy concerns in a third-party multi-tenant environment. This approach allows a customer to use the encryption technology that best suits the customer's needs, including the cloud provider's underlying IT infrastructure. For example, Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) is about protecting data-at-rest using server-side encryption with customer-provided encryption keys (SSE-C) or “BYOK”. With the encryption key you provide as part of your data request, Amazon S3 then manages the encryption (as it writes to disks) and decryption (when you access your data). You don't need to maintain any code to perform data encryption and decryption in S3. The only thing you do is manage the encryption keys you provide to the Amazon Simple Storage Service. When you upload an object, Amazon S3 uses the encryption key you provide to apply AES-256 encryption to your data and then removes the encryption key from memory. When you retrieve data, you must provide the same encryption key as part of your data request. Amazon S3 first verifies that the encryption key you provided matches, and then decrypts the data before returning it to you.

Important to Note: Amazon S3 does not store the encryption key you provide. Instead, they store a randomly salted HMAC value of the encryption key in order to validate future requests. The salted HMAC value cannot be used to derive the value of the encryption key or to decrypt the contents of the encrypted object. That means, if you lose the encryption key, you lose the object.

Any time a company decides it wants to host its applications in the cloud, or use a SaaS application where the company’s data will be stored in the cloud, their IT security professionals have to ask a series of questions.

• Can we encrypt the data? If so, who will have access to the keys?
• How will we perform key rotation and manage the lifecycle of the encryption keys?
• Is the cloud vendor using a proprietary encryption technology that prevents us from moving our data to another vendor?
• If we use 10 SaaS applications, will we have to administrate 10 different key management solutions?

These questions are tough enough to answer when the data and encryption technologies are in a company’s own data center where it has complete control over everything. In many cases, if encryption is provided, the cloud provider holds or has access to the keys, which creates another set of problems for the end user. For one thing, a third-party having access to data in the clear is a violation of regulations such as PCI-DSS, HIPAA, GLBA and others. Also, customers have yet to establish trust in cloud platforms or SaaS providers to protect their data. There have been many high profile data breaches that make end-users nervous. Customers also fear the U.S. government will subpoena access to their data without their knowledge or permission. For companies outside the U.S. that choose to use a U.S.-hosted cloud or app, there are data privacy and residency concerns. Instinctively it feels a lot more secure to manage your own key and use BYOK instead of leaving it to the cloud provider.

A few things have become crystal clear:

1. You need to know where your sensitive information is. Period.
2. You need to know who has access to it. Not who you think has access to it, but who really has access to it.
3. Wherever you put your sensitive information, you need to protect it. The most critical thing you need to do is to apply a strong defense in depth approach to data security, including the use of encryption and access controls.
4. You need to be able to document, through audit logs and reports, who has actually accessed your information. This is true (and important) for sensitive data, as well as for compliance-regulated data.
5. If you think that having your cloud service provider encrypt your data provides adequate security for your information, you probably need to rethink this.

It all boils down to this: When encrypted data is stored or processed in the cloud, the data and the keys must be kept separate and only the end-user should control the encryption keys.

Cloud storage options bring new economies and business efficiencies, but security can’t be ignored, and it can’t be simply outsourced to some other party. We believe that it is fundamental to good security to control all access to your data, including managing your own encryption keys. Managing encryption keys may sound daunting, but it doesn’t need to be. Our technology makes data security and encryption key management simple and straightforward. Our key management solution addresses all of the issues described above and can protect your data everywhere you have it stored.