Key Archival Process718 Netscape Certificate Management System Installation and Setup Guide • May 2002Here are a few situations in which you might need to recover a user’s encryptionprivate key:• An employee loses the encryption private key (for example, after a disk crashor by forgetting the password to the key file) and cannot read encrypted mailmessages.• An employee is on an extended leave, and you need access to an encrypteddocument in his or her files.• An employee leaves the company, and company officials need to perform anaudit that requires gaining access to the employee's encrypted mail.Where the Keys are StoredIf configured properly, the Data Recovery Manager, stores your users’ encryptionprivate keys automatically whenever the associated or connected RegistrationManager or Certificate Manager issues certificates to your users. The DataRecovery Manager stores encryption private keys in a secure key repository in itsinternal database; each key is stored as a key record.The archived copy of the key remains encrypted (or wrapped) with the DataRecovery Manager’s storage key; see “Storage Key Pair” on page 428. It can bedecrypted (or unwrapped) only by using the corresponding private key, to whichno individual has direct access. A combination of one or more key recovery agents’passwords enables the Data Recovery Manager to retrieve its private storage keyand use it to decrypt and recover an archived key. For details on how this processworks, see “Key Recovery Agents and Their Passwords” on page 721.The Data Recovery Manager indexes stored keys by key number (or ID), ownername, and a hash of the public key, allowing for highly efficient searching by nameor by public key. The key recovery agents have the privilege to insert, delete, andsearch for key records. The search feature works like this:• When the key recovery agents search by the key ID, only the key thatcorresponds to that ID is returned.• When the agents search by user name, all stored keys belonging to that ownerare returned.• When the agents search by the public key in a certificate, only thecorresponding private key is returned.
