Key management and lifetime

Key Management

The system tries to detect its operational environment and provide good zero-configuration behavioral defaults. The heuristic used is as follows.

  1. If the system is being hosted in Azure Web Sites, keys are persisted to the "%HOME%\ASP.NET\DataProtection-Keys" folder. This folder is backed by network storage and is synchronized across all machines hosting the application. Keys are not protected at rest. This folder supplies the key ring to all instances of an application in a single deployment slot. Separate deployment slots, such as Staging and Production, will not share a key ring. When you swap between deployment slots, for example swapping Staging to Production or using A/B testing, any system using data protection will not be able to decrypt stored data using the key ring inside the previous slot. This will lead to users being logged out of an ASP.NET application that uses the standard ASP.NET cookie middleware, as it uses data protection to protect its cookies. If you desire slot-independent key rings, use an external key ring provider, such as Azure Blob Storage, Azure Key Vault, a SQL store, or Redis cache.

  2. If the user profile is available, keys are persisted to the "%LOCALAPPDATA%\ASP.NET\DataProtection-Keys" folder. Additionally, if the operating system is Windows, they'll be encrypted at rest using DPAPI.

  3. If the application is hosted in IIS, keys are persisted to the HKLM registry in a special registry key that is ACLed only to the worker process account. Keys are encrypted at rest using DPAPI.

  4. If none of these conditions matches, keys are not persisted outside of the current process. When the process shuts down, all generated keys will be lost.

The developer is always in full control and can override how and where keys are stored. The first three options above should good defaults for most applications similar to how the ASP.NET auto-generation routines worked in the past. The final, fall back option is the only scenario that truly requires the developer to specify configuration upfront if they want key persistence, but this fall-back would only occur in rare situations.

警告

If the developer overrides this heuristic and points the data protection system at a specific key repository, automatic encryption of keys at rest will be disabled. At rest protection can be re-enabled via configuration.

Key Lifetime

Keys by default have a 90-day lifetime. When a key expires, the system will automatically generate a new key and set the new key as the active key. As long as retired keys remain on the system you will still be able to decrypt any data protected with them. See key management for more information.

Default Algorithms

The default payload protection algorithm used is AES-256-CBC for confidentiality and HMACSHA256 for authenticity. A 512-bit master key, rolled every 90 days, is used to derive the two sub-keys used for these algorithms on a per-payload basis. See subkey derivation for more information.