One good information security practice is known as the “two-man rule.” It comes from military history, where a nuclear missile couldn’t be launched unless two people agreed and turned their launch keys simultaneously. This requirement was introduced in order to prevent one individual from accidentally (or intentionally) starting World War III.
To prevent the risk of rogue employees misusing sensitive data we built a service in Go to enforce the two-person rule. We call the service Red October after the famous scene from “The Hunt for Red October.” In line with our philosophy on security software, we are open sourcing the technology so you can use it in your own organization (here’s a link to the public Github repo). If you are interested in the nitty-gritty details, read on.
Red October is a cryptographically-secure implementation of the two-person rule to protect sensitive data. From a technical perspective, Red October is a software-based encryption and decryption server. The server can be used to encrypt a payload in such a way that no one individual can decrypt it. The encryption of the payload is cryptographically tied to the credentials of the authorized users.
Authorized persons can delegate their credentials to the server for a period of time. The server can decrypt any previously-encrypted payloads as long as the appropriate number of people have delegated their credentials to the server.
