It's now been two years since I used KMS, but at the time it seemed little more than S3 API interface with Twitter size limitations
Fundamentally why would KMS be more secure than S3 anyway? Both ultimately have the same fundamental security requirements and do the same thing.
So the big whirlydoo is KMS has hardware keygen. im sorry, that sounds like something almost guaranteed to have nsa backdoor, or has so much nsa attention it has been compromised.
If your threat model is the NSA and you’re worried about backdoors then don’t use any cloud provider?
Maybe I’m just jaded from years doing this, but two things have never failed me for bringing me peace of mind in the infrastructure/ops world:
1. Use whatever your company has already committed to. Compare options and bring up tradeoffs when committing to a cloud-specific service(ie. AWS Lambdas) versus more generic solutions around cost, security and maintenance.
2. Use whatever feels right to you for anything else.
Preventing the NSA from cracking into your system is a fun thought exercise, but life is too short to make that the focus of all your hosting concerns
I guess since this is Hacker News, I shouldn’t be surprised that there are a bunch of commenters who are absolutely certain they and their random colo provider will do a better job of defeating the almighty NSA than AWS.
You won’t even know when they serve your Colo provider with a warrant under gag order, and I’m certain they’ll be able to bypass your own “tamper-proof” protections.
Soo..... you're saying that KMS hardware key generation isn't that great anyway...
so, again, why bother with KMS? What does it offer?
My point about the hardware was asking why KMS hardware key generation has any real value vs a software generated key, and then why bother with KMS and its limited secret size, and you access KMS with a policy/security user or role that can be used equally to lock down S3?
If the NSA is part of your threat model then good luck. I'm not sure any single company could withstand the NSA really trying to hack them for years. The threat of possible NSA backdoors is not a reasonable argument against a cloud provider as the NSA could also have backdoors in every CPU AMD and Intel and AWS makes.
Fundamentally why would KMS be more secure than S3 anyway? Both ultimately have the same fundamental security requirements and do the same thing.
So the big whirlydoo is KMS has hardware keygen. im sorry, that sounds like something almost guaranteed to have nsa backdoor, or has so much nsa attention it has been compromised.