Are secrets hidden from admins too - ?

[Martin Kletzander]

On Mon, Aug 09, 2021 at 11:48:11AM +0100, lejeczek wrote:
>Hi guys.
>
>On a remote & "shared" systems - are private secrets
>completely 100% safe? Can root get to those?
>(naturally excluding hacking of unknown bugs & exploits and
>theories such as "no computer system is ultimately safe")
>

Well, the secret needs to be kept somewhere.  The most secure you can
get with secrets is the ephemeral ones, but those still need to be kept
in memory.  You could encrypt them, but then you would need to provide
the decryption passphrase or key when you want to use them and that
would be like providing the secret itself anyway.  Even thought there
are some limitations to unlimited memory access in Linux when someone
has root access you have to assume they have access to what the system
has access too.

The best you can do to mitigate that is using something like Intel SGX,
AMD SEV and such like.  There is Launch Security [0] in libvirt, but I
think it only supports SEV and something on s390.  But I do not have any
experience with those.

[0] https://libvirt.org/formatdomain.html#id113

>And if answer is yes then - do you have any best practices
>for storing & managing of those secrets?
>
>many thanks, L.
>
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