[ksk-change] planned vs. emergency (was Re: [ksk-rollover] root zone KSK ...)

[Tomofumi Okubo]

Hello Mike,

More than 1 standby key sounds even better! I think this is something
worth exploring as it will give us more options to logically protect
the KSK (e.g. standby keys with different algorithms, different key
lengths etc...).

# Some CA's have multiple root CA's (for the same assurance level) in
the cert store with different specs. This is a bit like that.

Thanks!
Tomofumi

On Sun, Sep 21, 2014 at 10:49 AM, Michael StJohns
<msj at nthpermutation.com> wrote:
> On 9/21/2014 1:21 PM, Tomofumi Okubo wrote:
>>
>> Hello Joe,
>>
>> On Sun, Sep 21, 2014 at 8:41 AM, Joe Abley <jabley at hopcount.ca> wrote:
>>
>>> Having such a standby key available (e.g. as recommended in RFC 5011, and
>>> by Mike StJohns in the past)
>
>
> Heh... since I wrote 5011, you might expect those to be similar.
>>>
>>>   would help align the two procedures, although an approach for
>>> mitigating the compromise of both active and standby keys would still be
>>> required for the general case of emergency roll due to compromise.
>>
>> Yes I agree. I like the idea of having standby keys that will help a lot.
>>
>> Although, even with the standby keys, we still need to consider
>> scenarios in which both keys needs to be replaced such as algorithm
>> compromise (if it is the same) or physical compromise of the key (if
>> both key sit on he same HSM).
>
>
> Worst case is compromise of all trust anchor keys.  5011 allows you to
> recover from an N-1 compromise (where you have at least one private key
> associated with the root trust anchor set that hasn't been compromised).
> Absent DNS size limitations, you could set N to be 3 or 4 and sequester the
> N-1 standby private keys in a manner to minimize their compromise.  The
> probability of a catastrophic worst case is then
>
> Psecure = 1-PRODUCT[for each key](1-Psecure[key]))
>
> Say the probability for an active key to stay secure over 10 years is 99%
> and for a stand by key is 99.9%.  For a three key system with two keys in
> standby, then the math is 1-(.01 * .001 * .001) or a 99.999999% chance of
> keeping the system secure for 10 years.
>
> Of course the hard part is crafting protections to give you those chances.
>
> Later, Mike
>
>
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Tomofumi
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