Yes, backup of the keys in HSM must be done by the the HSM and its
tools. It's the purpose of HSM's not to make private keys available to
applications.
Regards,
David
On 2021-08-12 01:27, Luveh Keraph wrote:
Thanks for your reply. I am trying to address the case
in which an HSM
is used. My guess is that, in such a case, the best that one can do
using the Knot framework itself is to back up the KASP (which contains
public keys and zone metadata, but no private keys) while relying on
some external, HSM-dependent mechanism to back up (and restore, as
needed) the matching private keys. Is this a correct assessment of
things?
If I understood you correctly, the backup command that you mention
would work (in 3.1) when using the default cryptographic provider
alone - i.e. not with SoftHSM, or any actual HSM. Right?
On Wed, Aug 11, 2021 at 5:07 PM David Vasek <david.vasek(a)nic.cz>
wrote:
> Hello Luveh,
>
> this will backup the KASP DB and all private keys, unless they are
> stored in a HSM, and nothing else:
>
> knotc zone-backup +backupdir your_backup_directory +kaspdb
> +nozonefile
> +nojournal +notimers +nocatalog
>
> The details are described here:
>
https://www.knot-dns.cz/docs/3.1/html/man_knotc.html
> This is new in 3.1, in previous versions, KASP DB and private keys
> couldn't be backed up separately without the other data. Please
> don't
> forget that the keys are stored in plain in the backup, i.e. in the
> same
> way as Knot stores them in its repository.
>
> Regards,
> David
>
> On 2021-08-11 21:39, Luveh Keraph wrote:
>> According to the documentation, one can back up the KASP using the
>> mdb_dump command. Now I understand things correctly, this will
> just
>> back up the public component of key pairs, plus some metadata for
> the
>> zones the public keys are associated with.
>>
>> Are there any provisions in Knot concerning the backing up of the
>> private components of key pairs, or is this something that must be
>> done separately and within the context of whatever cryptographic
>> provider is used?