0

In light of the upcoming GDPR regulations, the company I work for is looking at upgrading their encryption algorithms and encrypting significantly more data than before. As the one appointed to take care of this, I have replaced our old CAST-128 encryption (I say encryption but it was more like hashing, no salt and resulting in the same ciphertext every time) with AES-256 and written the tools to migrate the data. However, the encryption key is still hardcoded in the application, and extractable within a couple of minutes with a disassembler.

Our product is a desktop application, which most of our clients have installed in-house. Most of them are also hosting their own DBs. Since they have the entirety of the product locally, securing the key seems like a pretty difficult task.

After some research, I've decided to go with the following approach. During the installation, a random 256-bit key will be generated for every customer and used to encrypt their data with AES encryption. The key itself will then be encrypted with DPAPI in user mode, where the only user who can access the data will be a newly created locked down domain service account with limited permissions, who is unable to actually log in to the machine. The encrypted key will the be stored in an ACL-ed part of the registry. The encryption module will then impersonate that user to perform its functions.

The problem is that since the key will be randomly generated at install time, and encrypted immediately, not even we will have it. If customers happen to delete this account, reinstall the server OS, or manage to lose the key in some other manner, the data will be unrecoverable. So after all that exposition, here comes the actual question:

I am thinking of having customers back up the registry where the key is stored and assuming that even after a reinstall or user deletion, as long as the same user account is created with the same password, on the same machine, it will create the same DPAPI secrets and be able to decrypt the key. However, I do not know whether or not that is the case since I'm not sure how these secrets are generated in the first place. Can anyone confirm whether or not this is actually the case? I'm also open to suggestions for a completely different key storage approach if you can think of a better one.

Brandon Heat
  • 1
  • 1
  • 7

1 Answers1

1

I don't see the link with GDPR but let's say this is just context.

It takes more than the user account, its password and the machine. there is more Entropy added to the ciphering of data with DPAPI.

See : https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms995355.aspx#windataprotection-dpapi_topic02

A small drawback to using the logon password is that all applications running under the same user can access any protected data that they know about. Of course, because applications must store their own protected data, gaining access to the data could be somewhat difficult for other applications, but certainly not impossible. To counteract this, DPAPI allows an application to use an additional secret when protecting data. This additional secret is then required to unprotect the data. Technically, this "secret" should be called secondary entropy. It is secondary because, while it doesn't strengthen the key used to encrypt the data, it does increase the difficulty of one application, running under the same user, to compromise another application's encryption key. Applications should be careful about how they use and store this entropy. If it is simply saved to a file unprotected, then adversaries could access the entropy and use it to unprotect an application's data. Additionally, the application can pass in a data structure that will be used by DPAPI to prompt the user. This "prompt structure" allows the user to specify an additional password for this particular data. We discuss this structure further in the Using DPAPI section.

Jeff LOMBARDO
  • 324
  • 1
  • 11