SSH Key Management
Gathering Intelligence About Your SSH Keys
As part of any secure file transfer solution, organisations use legacy SSH and OpenSSH key pairs. Potentially, an enterprise has hundreds of thousands of active keys.
But what are all of these keys for? Which keys do you really need, and which ones can you safely remove?
SSH Key Management software gives you visibility into the keys that are active across your enterprise, helping you make intelligent and informed decisions. By understanding keys more effectively, you can tighten your security and meet the demands of compliance.
Using an SSH Key Management solution, you can discover the trust relationships you didn’t know you had, lock down and monitor your SSH environment, and manage and control user keys more effectively.
Read on to find out more about SSH Key Management solutions, or contact us now for more help.
Let’s take a closer look at SSH Key Management
What are SSH Keys?
When people need to automate application-to-application transfer, they use public key authentication in the SSH protocol.
Public key authentication involves a pair of linked keys. The private key is stored, and its matching pair can be distributed to prove the identity of users or applications.
Sometimes, these pairs are referred to as trust relationships.
Many organisations also use SSH keys to grant access to administrators.
The Problem with SSH key Management
SSH Keys are an incredibly secure and time-tested way of authenticating user identity. But they are far from perfect.
A few common problems are:
- Administrators don’t know what each key is used for and what would happen if one was removed
- It is hard to see who has access to what data
- Private keys can be stolen. If this happens, they remain usable. The solution is rotating keys regularly, but with thousands of hard to track keys, rotating is complex and full of risk.
- Setting up new trust relationships is a manual processing, costing millions of pounds every year
- Unmanaged user keys are a major security threat and, as a result, a leading cause of failed compliance audits
Auditing and SSH Key Management
Enterprises need to comply with strict regulations, including FISMA, HIPAA, SOX and PCI DSS. One requirement of compliance is control and visibility over who has access to a system, and robust policies for removing access.
If your SSH keys are unmanaged, they violate these requirements. As a result, you will fail to achieve compliance.
SSH Key Management Software
To help you manage your SSH keys, we have selected the Universal SSH Key Manager, from SSH Tectia.
This scalable solution allows you to automate key creation, improve visibility over existing trust relationships, and better secure your data.
Universal SSH Key Manager brings together different SSH key types, including Tectia SSH and OpenSSH.
Why choose HANDD?
HANDD are a global centre of excellence for SSH Tectia, providing SSH Key Management solutions for some of the worlds largest enterprises.
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