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I would be interested in the details of the storage mechanism of the global pepper. Is this in an HSM? For AWS customers, something like KMS? There are then hug
by ppierald 10y ago
I would be interested in the details of the storage mechanism of the global pepper. Is this in an HSM? For AWS customers, something like KMS? There are then huge operational and redundancy issues to think about. Failovers for your HSM. Handling the possibility that AWS might not be available or corrupt the key, other cases. These things are easy to whiteboard, but when the rubber hits the road and you need to think about all the operational edge cases, things get hard quick.
- dsacco 10y agoIt's not in an HSM. Dropbox states towards the end of the article that they're exploring HSM applications for pepper storage, which I think is a great idea. If I recall correctly, Facebook is also exploring (or has already implemented) an HSM for password database secret key storage. You raise good points though. This system is significantly safer than best practices (bcrypt(password, 10)), but it has significantly more overhead. There's also diminishing returns here. For a company of Dropbox's size - sure, invest in this. For a company that came out of YC S16, no, don't bother. Just properly bcrypt/PBKDF2/scrypt/argon2 the thing and revisit much later. I love it, but I would not recommend this system to my clients for password storage unless they had a very mature operations/reliability team.
- phonon 10y agoUmmm.. "Going forward, we’re considering storing the global pepper in a hardware security module (HSM). At our scale, this is an undertaking with considerable complexity, but would significantly reduce the chances of a pepper compromise."