key management
3 articles with this tag
Coincheck NEM Heist (2018) — How ~$530M Was Stolen, and the Key-Management Defense
The entry point was reported to be spear-phishing / malware aimed at employees, which stole the private key of an internet-connected hot wallet; ~523 million XEM (~$530M at the time) was then moved out in a single transfer. The core failure was keeping a huge, instantly-spendable balance in an online wallet with no multisig, so a single stolen key moved almost everything. Defend by keeping important keys offline or in a dedicated key store (HSM/KMS), minimizing the hot balance, removing single points of failure (multi-approval), and detecting and stopping abnormal bulk operations.
SSH key least privilege: keep production root keys off ephemeral environments that can be compromised
Registering a root key into production from an ephemeral, compromisable environment (GPU pod, CI runner, throwaway VM) means that the moment the environment is compromised, an attacker gets root on production. Fix: no root keys on ephemeral environments; remove keys when unused; if needed again, use a non-root user plus a command-restricted key that limits the key to one operation. Treat a reused key as your most critical asset, and never build a setup where one leaked key opens every server.
Heartbleed (CVE-2014-0160) — an OpenSSL bug that leaked server memory
OpenSSL's memory over-read could leak private keys and sessions. The cause: the server trusted a claimed length and read adjacent memory. The lesson: act as if it all leaked (re-issue certificates, rotate all secrets), monitor widely used base libraries, and value memory safety.