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Showing posts from May, 2020

Benchmarking Azure Key Vault Decryption

Azure Key Vault is used to store Keys, Certificates and Secrets and make them available to applications safely. It can create and store asymmetric (RSA and EC) keys. These keys expose their public key material but the private key remains stored within Key Vault. For decryption, the application needs to make a REST call to the Key Vault which will then return the decrypted result. There are libraries available for various languages and frameworks (including .NET) which enable developers to do this seamlessly. Integrating Azure Key Vault with .NET applications is a straight-forward process although  not documented widely . One of the frequently recommended technique for securing data is to use Envelope Encryption . This requires use Key Encryption Key (KEK) which is typically a RSA key stored in Azure Key Vault. The Data Encryption Key (DEK) is generated for each piece of data and is then used to encrypt the data using symmetric algorithms like AES. DEK is then itself encrypted using KEK