9.3 Accountability

Before · SP 800-57 Part 1 Rev. 4

After · SP 800-57 Part 1 Rev. 5

Accountability

Before · SP 800-57 Part 1 Rev. 4

After · SP 800-57 Part 1 Rev. 5

Accountability has two different aspects with respect to key management: responsibility and traceability. Each human involved with key management must be clearly informed about their key- management responsibilities and held accountable for fulfilling them. This includes the roles that people are assigned, the key-management responsibilities for those roles, and monitoring the performance of the individuals assigned to those roles. See SP 800-130 for discussions of the different roles and responsibilities associated with key management. Accountability/traceability involves the identification of those entities that are authorized to generate, access, destroy, or otherwise use keys; to record who or what actually performs these actions; and to audit these logs for security violations (also see Section 9.4 ). Accountability/traceability can be an effective tool to help prevent key compromises and reduce the impact of compromises when they are detected. In order to provide traceability for a system, a means of identifying the entities accessing the system needs to be implemented and access-control mechanisms employed (see Section 9.1 ). Although it is preferred that no humans be able to view keys, as a minimum, any access to plaintext cryptographic keys shall be traceable to the entity accessing them, regardless of whether the entity is a human, device, application, or process. Access to ciphertext keys and key shares should also be traceable to the accessing entities. For example, a sophisticated accountability/traceability system might be able to determine each entity that had control of any given key over its entire lifespan. This would include the entity that generated the key, the entity that used the key to cryptographically protect data, any other entity known to have accessed the key, and the entity that was responsible for destroying the key when it was no longer needed. Even though these other entities may never have actually accessed the key in its plaintext form, any actions they performed on or with the key should be traceable to them. Accountability/traceability provides three significant advantages: