I have developed a tool that loads in an configuration file at runtime. Some of the values are encrypted with an AES key.
The tool will be scheduled to run on a regular basis from a remote machine. What is an acceptable way to provide the decryption key to the program. It has a command line interface which I can pass it through. I can currently see three options
1 and 2 i.e. Have a base key in exe and then accept partial key via CLI. This way I can use the same build for multiple machines, but it doesn't solve the problem of decompiling the exe.It is worth noting that I am not too worried about decompiling the exe to get key. If i'm sure there are ways I could address via obfuscation etc.
Ultimately if I was really conscious I wouldn't be storing the password anywhere.
I'd like to hear what is considered best practice. Thanks.
I have added the Go tag because the tool is written in Go, just in case there is a magical Go package that might help, other than that, this question is not specific to a technology really.
UPDATE:: I am trying to protect the key from external attackers. Not the regular physical user of the machine.
Best practice for this kind of system is one of two things:
A sysadmin authenticates during startup, providing a password at the console. This is often extremely inconvenient, but is pretty easy to implement.
A hardware device is used to hold the credential. The most common and effective are called HSMs (Hardware Security Modules). They come in all kinds of formats, from USB keys to plug-in boards to external rack-mounted devices. HSMs come with their own API that you would need to interface with. The main feature of an HSM is that it never divulges its key, and it has physical safeguards to protect against it being extracted. Your app sends it some data and it signs the data and returns it. That proves that that the hardware module was connected to this machine.
For specific OSes, you can make use of the local secure credential storage, which can provide some reasonable protection. Windows and OS X in particular have these, generally keyed to some credential the admin is required to type at startup. I'm not aware of a particularly effective one for Linux, and in general this is pretty inconvenient in a server setting (because of manual sysadmin intervention).
In every case that I've worked on, an HSM was the best solution in the end. For simple uses (like starting an application), you can get them for a few hundred bucks. For a little more "roll-your-own," I've seen them as cheap as $50. (I'm not reviewing these particularly. I've mostly worked with a bit more expensive ones, but the basic idea is the same.)
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