secure-key-managment

A collection of modules for securely working with cryptographic keys and secrets

Goals

It is important that you understand the goals and short-comings of this module, so you can effectively incorporate it into your security model.

• This is not a replacement for a Hardware-Secure Module (HSM), which provides a physical trust boundary around your keys.
• This module is intended to provide secure defaults for storing keys on disk, retrieval into memory and management while kept in memory. It does so by:
  • Setting highly restricted access permissions for files on disk (0400).
  • It uses Secure Buffers extensively. Keys are read directly from disk into secure memory, appropriate memory protection is applied to avoid accidental or malicious access, keys are never swapped to disk nor will they appear in core dumps.
  • Misuse is considered a fatal error and will crash the program. Fatal errors include:
    • Reading an unexpected number of key bytes
    • Changing bytes of a key
    • Accessing a key after it has been destroyed

Usage

WIP - A unified API will eventually surface, composed of the following modules:

• secure-create-key
• secure-destroy-key
• secure-read-key

Secure Buffers

The modules in this suite use the Secure Buffers from sodium-native extensively. Secure Buffers are a wrapper around libsodium secure memory, but with the same interface as normal Node.js Buffers.

Secure Buffers take more space than normal buffers, but with the benefit that overflows and underflows are detected and that data is destroyed when the memory is released (eg. garbage collected in Node.js). Secure memory is also marked as not being swappable, meaning the OS will not write it to disk when swapping pages in and out of main memory, which could lead to accidental exposure. Secure memory is also masked in case of a core dump. Secure memory can also have memory protection applied, so you can control noaccess, readonly and readwrite state of the memory, crashing the process if these protections are broken.

Be aware that even though it has the same API as normal Buffers, only the read operations should be used, and that reading data out of the Buffer may break any security guarantees, except when passed to a function that can work directly with the underlying memory.

Install

npm install secure-key-managment

License

ISC