[chef-dev] Re: How Secure is an encrypted data bag, really?

[Noah Kantrowitz < >]

The specific protection you get from encrypted data bags is just is the 
database of the server is disclosed, they can't get the encrypted info. This 
is a very specific, but useful, bit of cryptographic safety, but thats 
basically all you get (you can go a bit further if you want to check them 
into source control and apply the same logic to your SCM). As you noted, an 
actively hostile Chef server is a 100% game over scenario because it is 
shipping executable code to be run as root (usually) on your servers. If you 
want some different security assurances, you could check out chef-vault, 
though it still can't protect against a hostile Chef server.

--Noah

On Oct 3, 2013, at 10:23 PM, Bryan Taylor 
<
 >
 wrote:

> 
> If an attacker gains access to the chef server, can they not alter cookbook 
> code that chef clients eventually run to obtain the data bag decryption 
> keys this way?  Is there any protection against this? If not, are there 
> still scenarios where the encryption does add value?

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