Enhancing Security and Compliance with PubNub’s New Secret Key Rotation

Security and compliance are top priorities for enterprises today, and managing authentication credentials efficiently is a critical component of building secure and compliant solutions to protect sensitive information and prohibit unauthorized users. 

At PubNub, we understand the evolving security needs of our customers, which is why we’re excited to introduce Secret Key Rotation, a feature designed to provide seamless key management while ensuring uninterrupted service for end users. This ensures that only those with proper permissions can access the APIs needed to connect to PubNub services.

The Business Challenge

Many enterprises have stringent security and compliance policies requiring them to rotate all authentication secret keys regularly. However, many third-party secrets management systems lack an automated way to overlap periods when regenerating a secret key, creating potential vulnerabilities and requiring manual dev work and time whenever the key rotation process is needed. Additionally, manual processes increase the risk of unauthorized users gaining user access, potentially leading to data breaches or social engineering attacks.

Introducing Secret Key Rotation

To address these challenges, we’ve built Secret Key Rotation, a powerful new feature that allows customers to manage their authentication secrets with greater flexibility and control. With this feature, customers can now:

• Generate up to 5 secret keys in advance with access control via the Portal Admin.
• Seamlessly transition between an old key and a new key with an overlap period, ensuring no immediate disruption to existing authentication tokens.
• Reduce operational stress and system load by avoiding sudden spikes in token regeneration requests.

Why This Matters

1. Enhanced Security Compliance – Enterprises can now meet their security needs without disrupting their application’s functionality.
2. Seamless User Experience – End users will not experience downtime or forced re-authentication due to immediate token expiration.
3. Improved System Stability – By distributing the load of token regeneration over time, both PubNub and customer servers avoid unnecessary traffic spikes.
4. Easy-to-Use Interface – The intuitive Portal Admin UI makes it simple for customers to manage their secret keys efficiently.

Where Can I Use Secret Key Rotations

Secret Key Rotation is beneficial across every real-time application connecting to the PubNub platform. This also includes integrations via webhook or APIs, or platforms employing Kubernetes or AWS environments. To properly rotate keys means that enterprises can safeguard against security vulnerabilities associated with identifiers, headers, environment variables, and access control mechanisms, helping reduce the potential for data breaches.

How to Get Started

Getting started with Secret Key Rotation is simple:

1. Navigate to the Portal Admin in your PubNub account.
2. Generate and store up to 5 secret keys in advance.
3. Configure an overlap period to ensure a smooth transition.
4. Rotate old keys with new ones without impacting active sessions.