The Keys To Your Castle, and Your Backdoor, Front door and Side door

The Greatest Risk to the security of your organisation?

So what are your company’s keys to the castle?

Well, for many, it is the SSH keys that support the accesses to cloud-based systems and code repositories. If these keys are compromised, it can lead to threats around the large scale loss of Intellectual Property (IP), data loss, and a whole lot of other things. Your company can also lose all digital trust in itself, and to external systems.

Most developers, for example, know that these key provide the core protection against a loss of their code, and where the management of these keys is now fundamental to the security of many organisations. For GitHub access, or for AWS and Azure accesses, it is magical public keys that give them trusted access. A loss of the private key associated with the public key, then, can mean a large scale breach of data, and a general loss of trust.

The Trusted Connection …

For an SSH connection, I’ll illustrate the process with Bob (the client) and Alice (the server):