Key Ceremony

A Key Ceremony is only required when your organisation wishes to achieve your own independent root, or intermediate, Certificate Authority. This typically occurs where an organisation wants to create and own its own Root CA for reasons relating to compliance to specific standards (e.g. ISO 27001, WebTrust, EU Qualified Certificates, etc).

A Root Key Ceremony is a procedure where a unique pair of Public and Private Root Keys is generated. Depending on your requirements and specifications, the generation of the Root Keys may require notarisation, legal representation, witnesses and ‘Key Holders’ to be present. This process is best explained with some examples:

Unless the information being accessed or transmitted is valued in terms of millions of dollars, it is probably sufficient that the Digi-CAST2™ Team conduct the Root Key Ceremony within the security of the Digi-CAST2™ Laboratory. The customer may opt to have the Root Key stored on a Luna Card or HSM, but in most cases the safe storage of the Root Key on a CD or hard disk is sufficient. The Root Key is never stored on the Digi-CA™server.

This type of environment requires much higher security than a commercial one. When conducting the Root Key Ceremony, the Government or Organization will require rigorous security checks to be conducted on all personnel in attendance. Those that are normally required to attend the Key Ceremony will include a minimum of two Administrators from the organisation, two signatories from the organisation, one lawyer, a notary and two video camera operators in addition to the Digi-CAST2™ Team.

The actual Root key-pair generation is normally conducted in a secure vault that has no communication or contact with the outside world other than a single telephone line or intercom. Once the vault is secured, all personnel present must prove their identity using at least two legally recognised forms of identification. Every person present, every transaction and every event is logged by the lawyer in a Root Key Ceremony Log Book and each page is notarized by the notary. From the moment the vault door is closed until it is re-opened, everything is also video recorded. The lawyer and the two organisation’s signatories must sign the recording and it too is then notarized.

Finally, as part of the above process, the Root Key is broken into as many as twenty-one parts and each individual part is secured in its own safe for which there is a key and a numerical lock. The keys are distributed to as many as twenty-one people and the numerical code is distributed to another twenty-one people.

Example A and B are at opposite ends of the security spectrum and no two environments are the same. When considering the Root Key Ceremony, the Digi-CAST1™ Team of professional advisors can assist you in deciding on the most efficient level of security to reflect the level of protection required.