Encryption

Part of the PurelyManage series. The Problem Migrating an organization’s email means moving every mailbox from the old provider into PurelyMail. Each mailbox requires the source IMAP credentials: the email address and password the user logs in with on the old system. The naive way to collect these is to email everyone a spreadsheet and ask them to fill in their passwords. That spreadsheet then sits in someone’s inbox or a shared drive, plaintext, accessible to anyone who can read it. It is also error-prone: users mistype passwords, the admin has no way to know if a credential is correct until the migration job fails. ...

Part of the PurelyManage series. PurelyManage handles two categories of sensitive data: IMAP passwords submitted by users during migration, and the session tokens that keep sysadmins logged in. Neither can be stored carelessly. This post covers how both are handled and why each design decision was made the way it was. Encrypting IMAP Credentials at Rest The problem with storing passwords When a user submits IMAP credentials for a migration job, the backend needs to hold onto those credentials until the job actually runs, which might be minutes or hours later depending on the queue. They have to live in the database. The question is in what form. ...