PGP keys: Can accidental exposures be mitigated?

Recently, security researcher Juho Nurminen attempted to contact Adobe via their Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) regarding a security bug he wanted to report. Instead, he stumbled across something much more vulnerable.

It turns out that Adobe not only published their public key on their website, which is used to send encrypted emails, but the corresponding private PGP keys, as well. After being contacted privately by Nurminen, Adobe moved quickly to revoke the key and had it changed.

The risks of having the entire key pair published on the site could have led to phishing, decryption of traffic, impersonation, and spoofed or signed messages from Adobe's PSIRT. This was extremely embarrassing for Adobe; however, their ability to act quickly was their saving grace.

One thing that they did right was putting a passphrase on the certificate because, without it, the Adobe private key is useless to those with malicious intent. This is one step that every organization should take to protect against the accidental release of a certificate or having an attacker gain access to keys and attempt to use them maliciously. Be warned though -- having a passphrase on a certificate for security is only as good as the passphrase it's being secured with, and a weak passphrase increases the probability of it being brute-forced.

Having procedures in place to quickly revoke PGP keys when needed should be part of your organization's incident response plan. This might not be a common occurrence for many people; however, being able to manage certificates in an expedited fashion could not only save your organization, but could also stop those with malicious intent from attempting to impersonate you.

Having procedures in place to quickly revoke PGP keys when needed should be part of your organization's incident response plan.
Acting quickly is extremely important. Luckily, the Adobe private key had limited use -- the certificate was only being used for email communication for the PSIRT, so it wasn't as publically used as some of their other certificates.

As for how the certificate was published in the first place, that's a different issue -- I'd be very curious to know why this certificate was sent in the first place, and who sent it. There should be some type of privileged access in place for these certificates internally, which I'm assuming is a different department from those managing the CMS.

I understand things can accidentally be miscommunicated or published, but there seems to have been a few breakdowns in the communication process for the Adobe private key to have been published to the internet. I'm hoping Adobe was able to learn from the experience, make adjustments and tighten their security.

My article at: http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/answer/PGP-keys-Can-accidental-exposures-be-mitigated