I want to keep our SSL key for our website confidential. It's stored on 2 USB sticks, one in a safe deposit box and one I keep secure. And then I'm the only one who applies it to the web server so that it is totally secure.
Except…
On IIS at least, you can export the key. So anyone who's an admin can then get a copy of the key. Is there any way around this? Or by definition do all admins have full access to all keys?
Update:
I do have sysadmins I fully trust. What led to this is one of them quit (they had an hour commute to our company, a 5 minute commute to the new one). While I trust this individual, just as we disable their Active Directory account when someone leaves, I thought we should have a way to insure they don't retain the ability to use our SSL.
And what struck me as easiest is if I'm the only one who has it. Our cert expires in January so this was the time to change the practice if we could. Based on the answers it looks like we cannot.
So this leads to a new question – when someone who has access to the cert leaves, is it standard practice to get a new cert and have the existing one revoked. Or if the person who left is trustworthy, then do we continue with the cert we have?
Best Answer
A person with administrative (or often even physical) access to a server is going to be able to extract the private key. Whether through exporting, memory sniffing, or other such trickery.
Your administrators have access to the private keys of your web servers. Accept this as fact, and work around that. If your sysadmins aren't trustworthy, then you may need better sysadmins or at least fewer sysadmins with access to the web servers. If it's a matter of management security paranoia, then there may be a deeper issue regarding their ability to trust a sysadmin.
This isn't to say that you should just let everybody have access to the private key. There should always be a need for access before access is granted. With that in mind, are you going to take extreme measures to make sure that a sysadmin with full control of a website can not export the private key, but can still manipulate the website itself in any number of nearly untraceable ways? We're back to trust here, and I think that's the core of the problem that needs to be addressed.