> Rebuilding continuously for security is not something I would recommend.
So that I understand, could you elaborate?
Particularly, do you mean "not recommend" as in "recommend against" or "not worth the bother"?
So that I understand, could you elaborate?
Particularly, do you mean "not recommend" as in "recommend against" or "not worth the bother"?
It's not crazy to periodically rotate keys, but attackers don't acquire keys by, you know, stumbling over them on the street or picking them up when you've accidentally left them on the bar. They get them because you have a vulnerability --- usually in your own code or configuration. Rebuilding will regenerate those kinds of vulnerabilities. Attackers will reinfect in seconds.
After a bunch of harrowing experiences with clients, I'm pretty close to believing "using packages for critical infrastructure is a bad idea".
In that case, you might be interested in bosh: http://bosh.io/docs/problems.html (the tool that enables the workflow jacques_chester was describing). It embraces the idea of reliably building from source for the exact reasons you've mentioned.
The win to rotating them is not so much because you'll be regularly evicting attackers you didn't know had your keys, but because when you do have a fire, you won't be finding out for the first time that you can't actually rotate them.
It also forces you to design things much more reliably which helps continuity in non-security scenarios.
After redeploying and realizing that Todd has to ssh in and hand edit that one hostname and fix a symlink that was supposed to be temporary so the new version of A can talk to B, that's going to get rolled in pretty quickly. Large operations not doing this tend to quickly end up in the "nobody is allowed to touch this pile of technical debt because we don't know how to re-create it anymore" problem.