----- "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 loaded it into two HSMs. The "raw" key was then manually secret shared accross five CD's (three being the quorum) which were distributed to five individuals for safe keeping. Because CD's have 700 Mb of storage and the share secret is tiny, literally thousands of copies of it were written on each CD along with the source code of the secret sharing software (written in Python). In theory every few years we are supposed to take out the CD's and verify that they can be read. It's probably time to do that now :-) 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! -- ======================================================================== Jeffrey I. Schiller MIT Network Manager Information Services and Technology Massachusetts Institute of Technology 77 Massachusetts Avenue Room W92-190 Cambridge, MA 02139-4307 617.253.0161 - Voice j...@mit.edu ======================================================================== --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majord...@metzdowd.com