[Freeipa-devel] DNSSEC design page: key wrapping

[Simo Sorce]

On Wed, 2014-03-05 at 13:05 +0100, Martin Kosek wrote:
> On 03/04/2014 11:14 PM, Petr Spacek wrote:
> > On 4.3.2014 22:53, Simo Sorce wrote:
> >> On Tue, 2014-03-04 at 22:38 +0100, Petr Spacek wrote:
> >>> On 4.3.2014 22:15, Simo Sorce wrote:
> >>>> On Tue, 2014-03-04 at 21:25 +0100, Petr Spacek wrote:
> ...
> >> I guess my only reservation is about whether DRM storage is replicated
> >> or not. Although both the K/M and DNS cases do not require the Vault to
> >> be online at all times because the keys will be downloaded and stored
> >> locally and only needs to be accessed when they changed, there is the
> >> problem of having all keys in a SPOF, that should not happen.
> > According to http://www.freeipa.org/page/V4/Password_Vault#Replication the
> > replication is available for DRM, we just need to use it.
> > 
> > IMHO a vault without replication is not useful anyway. Users are not happy when
> > their passwords disappear ;-)
> > 
> >> The additional thing about the Vault is that we can use key escrow there
> >> as a mechanism to re-encrypt automatically system relevant keys when a
> >> new server is joined to the realm.
> > So we agree that Vault offers what we want so we should use it, right?
> > 
> > I think we should determine if we can use Vault for K/M. It would be another
> > reason why we should use Vault instead of a custom solution.
> > 
> 
> Do we really want to use the heavy machinery Vault for DNSSEC keys? I would
> personally like to avoid it and use something more lightweight.
> 
> Vault seems to me as a too heavy requirement for FreeIPA server with DNS. It
> needs Tomcat and all the Java machinery, special installation, replication
> scheme, difficult debugging etc. In my mind, Vault is a specialized heavy
> component that solves specific problems that not every admin may want and thus
> may cause a lot of grief to such admins who just want CA-less FreeIPA and DNS(SEC).

Well keep in mind that you do not need a vault instance on every DNS
server, just like a CA a few servers would be sufficient. DNS key
rotation happens relatively 'rarely' so the dependency is not a huge
problem in terms of performance or management. There is the problem of
the heavyweight java-based infrastructure, but we already have that
dependency for the CA part, so it's not like we are adding anything new.

Simo.

-- 
Simo Sorce * Red Hat, Inc * New York