4 ms·
I much prefer having to repeatedly enter the password dozens of times than risking data leaking out - or worse, data being tampered with.
by FooBarWidget 13y ago
I much prefer having to repeatedly enter the password dozens of times than risking data leaking out - or worse, data being tampered with.
- adw 13y agoSo "yes" – what would you do if you had, say, several hundred (or several thousand) servers?
- FooBarWidget 13y agoIf I have that many servers then I can assume I have a large budget for security, right? I would make a password entering automation system. Ensure that that system is dead-simple and secured to death. It must run no other services, firewalled to death even from the intranet, physically secured in a cage, and must be off most of the time. It is only to be turned on when booting a system, and turning it on not only requires a password but also physically walking to the cage, opening it with a physical key, and pressing the "on" button. All target servers must be configured in such a way that they can obtain network access before mounting the encrypted part. But I'm not a security expert. Maybe I've overlooked something.
- raylu 13y agoWait, this sounds way harder than the previous solution and entering the password over a remote IPMI console.
- FooBarWidget 13y agoIt's harder to set up. But when the password entering automation system exists, you just grab the key, go to that system, unlock & boot it, then tell it to enter the passwords for your 1000 servers.
- gizzlon 13y agoWith that many servers you probably have to reboot a few of them pretty often.. You'd have to live in the datacentre :)
- adw 13y agoI'm not sure you can assume that if you're, say, Instagram (pre-big-round/acquisition). You may well have several hundred, even thousands, of AWS instances with a staff in single digits. Properly hard problem, as you've pointed out.
- jonknee 13y agoShouldn't all your servers have different passwords? How do you manage the passwords in case you're not available when the server reboots?
- FooBarWidget 13y agoHave two people know all the passwords. Let each of them encrypt this list of passwords with a password only they individually know. Sync passwords each time someone changes something.