OSF DCE Application Development Guide--Core Components

OSF DCE Application Development Guide—Core Components

principal. Two routines delete a principal’s key:

• The sec_key_mgmt_delete_key( ) routine removes all key types having the speciﬁed

key version identiﬁer from the local key storage, thus invalidating all extant tickets

encoded with that key.

• The sec_key_mgmt_delete_key_type( ) routine removes only a speciﬁed version of

a speciﬁed key type.

If the compromised key is the current one, the application should ﬁrst change the key

with sec_key_mgmt_change_key(). It is not an error for a process to delete the current

key as long as it is done after the login context has been established, but it may

inconvenience legitimate clients of a service. The inconvenience may be justiﬁed,

however, if the application data is sensitive.

Since an application may have no means to discover that its key has been compromised,

the rgy_edit tool provides interfaces that call sec_key_mgmt_delete_key(),

sec_key_mgmt_change_key(), and sec_key_mgmt_gen_rand_key( ) so that a network

administrator, who is more likely to detect that a key has been compromised, may handle

a security breach of this kind. As an alternative, the application may provide user

interfaces to these routines.

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