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We have a web service that acts as a gateway between our clients and another service. The clients send messages to, and receive random messages from, the third-party service. The client's server opens a channel to our web server via a secure socket in order to receive the incoming messages (and not have to poll the server every few minutes).

My question is: is it safe to leave this channel open indefinitely, or should we periodically close and re-open it to obtain new credentials (session keys)? If the latter, how often (hourly, daily, weekly) would be considered "best practice"? I've found a lot of information on secure communications, but nothing to answer this specific question.

Thanks

L Hampton
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  • IPSEC definitely renegotiates a session key every hour or so, and I think SSL might do too? From [RFC5746](http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5746) it looks like it might need to be initiated by your code, though, notjust happen automatically. – Rup Jan 23 '12 at 16:19

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SSL/TLS (which I'm going to assume you're talking about here) does NOT automatically refresh/renegotiate the session keys being used. There is a renegotiation procedure built-in to the protocol to allow the session keys to be changed within an active session but that procedure was found to have a significant vulnerability a few years back and the renegotiation process was changed (in RFC 5746, see here) to resolve the problem. If you do want to renegotiate the session keys for SSL/TLS, make sure you're doing it in the manner described in this RFC.

That does not, however, answer your original question of IF the session keys should be changed. The answer is...it depends on your security requirements. A good guideline to be used is that any encrypted communications can be eventually decrypted if you see enough of the encrypted data (how practical/doable this is can vary wildly). So, changing your keys every so often is a very good thing to do. If you're passing a small amount of data over a secured connection and the data isn't that sensitive, then you can get away with doing this on a not-so-regular basis (indeed, your SSL/TLS session is probably going to get broken and restablished due to timeouts on one of the two parties on a somewhat regular basis anyway...). If you've got a very sensitive dataset and you're sending alot of data, then I'd suggest rotating the keys every day or so to mitigate this risk (just do it in a secure manner).