The security of the BoB infrastructure relies heavily on strong cryptographic mechanisms to secure data integrity and data origin authentication. Secure management of the private encryption keys are therefor therefore of utmost importance. This chapter provides an overview of which types of keys are used, and what they are used for.
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Through the Metadata, the Participants are then able to subsequently exchange other types of keys securely. ThereforTherefore, it is of utmost importance that the keys used for administrating and managing Metadata are kept secure. These keys need to be rolled (changeschanged) if there is the slightest suspicion they have been compromised.
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The authentication of end-entities within the BoB infrastructure relies upon a federated approach based in assertions in the JSON Web Token (JWT) format. These assertions are cryptographically signed, and the public component of such keys used for signing are exchanged through the Metadata as explained abowabove.
In addition, each end-entity requires its own keys to be able to authenticate to the Authentication Service. The preferred way of doing this in the BoB Infrastructure is to generate a key-pair and a self-signed certificate for each such entity. The private key is used in the authentication phase to retrieve an assertion which can be used for accessing other services, both internally and across organisational borders. Such assertions shall have an expiry time, after which the end-entity is required to re-authenticate to the Authentication Service. A reasonable life-time is the time of a work-shift, such as 8-9 hours.
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