AES Encryption and key storage?

Question

Hi everyone,

A few years ago, when first being introduced to ASP.net and the .NET Framework, I built a very simple online file storage system. This system used Rijndael encryption for storing the files encrypted on the server's hard drive, and an HttpHandler to decrypt and send those files to the client.

Being one of my first project with ASP.net and databases, not understanding much about how the whole thing works (as well as falling to the same trap described by Jeff Atwood on this subject), I decided to store freshly generated keys and IVs together with each file entry in the database.

To make things a bit clearer, encryption was only to protect files from direct access to the server, and keys were not generated by user-entered passwords.

My question is, assuming I don't want to keep one key for all files, how should I store encryption keys for best security? What is considered best practice? (i.e: On a different server, on a plain-text file, encrypted).

Also, what is the initialization vector used for in this type of encryption algorithm? Should it be constant in a system?

Answer 1

Keys should be protected and kept secret, simple as that. The implementation is not. Key Management Systems get sold for large amounts of money by trusted vendors because solving the problem is hard.

You certainly don't want to use the same key for each user, the more a key is used the "easier" it comes to break it, or at least have some information leaks. AES is a block cipher, it splits the data into blocks and feeds the results of the last block encryption into the next block. An initialization vector is the initial feed into the algorithm, because at the starting point there is nothing to start with. Using random IVs with the same key lowers the risk of information leaks - it should be different for every single piece of data encrypted.

How you store the keys depends on how your system is architected. I've just finished a KMS where the keys are kept away from the main system and functions to encrypt and decrypt are exposed via WCF. You send in plain text and get a reference to a key and the ciphered text back - that way the KMS is responsible for all cryptography in the system. This may be overkill in your case. If the user enters a password into your system then you could use that to generate a key pair. This keypair could then be used to encrypt a key store for that user - XML, SQL, whatever, and used to decrypt each key which is used to protect data.

Without knowing more about how your system is configured, or it's purpose it's hard to recommend anything other than "Keys must be protected, keys and IVs must not be reused."

Answer 2

As a pretty good soltution, you could store your Key/IV pair in a table:

ID                    Key           IV
skjsh-38798-1298-hjj  FHDJK398720== HFkjdf87923==

When you save an encrypted value, save the ID and a random Salt value along with it.

Then, when you need to decrypt the value, lookup the key/iv pair using the id and the salt stored with the data.

You'd want to make sure you have a good security model around the key storage. If you went with SQL server, don't grant SELECT rights to the user that accesses the database from the application. You wouldn't want to give someone access to the whole table.