Subject: Re: [keyassure] key per host

From: Brian Sniffen <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2010 11:23:18 -0400

Tony Finch <[email-masked]> writes:

>> Say that I am managing 100,000 sites on 100 actual machines. Do I want
>> to have to manage 100,000 keys that are bound to the sites or 100 keys
>> that are bound to machines? Note that the sites float fairly freely
>> from machine to machine and moving crypto on machines that use crypto
>> accelerators is non-trivial.
>
> If the server farm acts as a single service then a single key would seem
> right to me. The crypto accelerator is more likely to live on the load
> balancer than the servers.

We certainly find need to use multiple keys to identify each of several
principals authorized to provide a service.  For example, Example,
Inc. might hold one key & certificate for www.example.com and authorize
a CDN or service provider to also provide service for www.example.com.
Each such service provider commonly generates his own key and requests
his own certificate---it saves arguing about who compromised a key, for
example.

- -Brian

- -- 
Brian T. Sniffen <[email-masked]>
Information Security
Akamai Technologies, Inc.