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Comment by nijave | Hacker News Reader

How can the key be stolen easily? That really depends on the security of the Redis setup. Redis is typically not internet accessible so you'd need some sort of server exploit.

Would have been good if the article example showed a Redis server with TLS and password auth.

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Private key material should not be kept in the clear anywhere, ideally. This includes on your dev machine, serialised in a store, in the heap of your process, anywhere. Of course, it depends on your threat environment, but the article did mention pci-dss. If you put it in redis, then anyone that has access (internal baddies exist too!) can steal the key and sign something. Its hard to repudiate that.

How far do you go, how do you use the private key to sign something if you can't keep it anywhere?

TPM

You never have the private key, only the ability to ask something to encrypt/sign something

The most typical end-game is using a HSM-backed cloud product, generating the PK in the HSM (it never leaves), and making calls across the network to the key vault service for signing requests.

This is a hard tradeoff between availability and compliance. If the cloud service goes down or you have an internet issue, you would lose the ability to sign any new tokens. This is a fairly fundamental aspect of infrastructure so it's worth considering if you absolutely must put it across the wire.

Its a spectrum, like all things.

It crosses from everyone has the keys like in this example, to centralising a signing service using just software, or using something like KMS or CloudHSM, or YubiHSM, or going big and getting a HA Luna (or similar) HSM setup.

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