[chef] Re: Re: Question about Hosted Chef

[Jing Li < >]

Thanks so much, your comments actually solved our concerns. Very appreciate.

Jing 

On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 4:34 AM, Noah Kantrowitz < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

Yep, please no one take my comments out of context. Hosted Chef is AFAIK a secure system. When I say there are few security properties I'm talking about provable cryptographic models. This is very different from saying there is no security, just that there is no provable model for why (say) you cannot read another user's data. That is a property of the system because the code says that you cannot, not because of some fancy trick of math that makes it so. When you start talking about audit logs, ACLs, etc those are a totally different layer of the system :-)

--Noah

On May 27, 2015, at 1:12 AM, Ben Rockwood < "> > wrote:

> Some clarification is required here.
>
> Chef takes the security of Hosted Chef _very_ seriously.  For details please contact Chef Sales and they can supply you with all the information you need, depending on the types of concerns or compliance requirements you have.
>
> To Noah's point, encrypted data bags provide you with additional security to ensure that even above-and-beyond the security we employ your data is safe.  We highly recommend utilizing encryption to ensure the highest level of protection.  You can learn more about them here:
>
> https://docs.chef.io/chef/essentials_data_bags.html
>
> On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 11:25 PM, Noah Kantrowitz < "> > wrote:
>
> On May 26, 2015, at 9:02 PM, Jing Li < "> > wrote:
>
> > Hi There,
> >
> > We are currently hosting our own Chef Server on AWS, it's awesome!
> >
> > As our servers growing, we are looking at to move to the hosted Chef solution. Since we store many credential information in our cook books such as SSL certificate, passwords and etc, we would like to learn more about the security mode for hosted Chef solution.
> >
> > Can anyone please help us on it?
>
> The security model is basically that there isn't one. Chef has lots of awesome engineers but Hosted Chef is, at heart, just a big database-powered web app and so has the same overall security properties as most other apps like that you've worked with. One of the major reasons why encrypted data bags were added is it gives you an "out" on the security side of things, Hosted Chef never gets a copy of the decryption key(s) and so within the bounds of AES being considered unbreakable these days you can assume that no possible data leakage from Hosted Chef could disclose the encrypted items. Beyond that you would need to be more specific about what kind of properties you are looking at.
>
> --Noah
>
>

--

Jing Li 
Senior .Net Developer, The Network for Learning Ltd

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