what are the security option can be use in Azure stroage Authentication?

Question

From the white paper and online document,

seems the only way to access storage is using share key.

Question 1:
what is the different between Primary ShareKey and Secondary Sharekey

Question 2:
when turn on https, can we use certificate? or it is only helping to encrypt the whole content

- thx

Answer 1

what is the different between Primary ShareKey and Secondary Sharekey

There is no difference. The reason for having two keys is so that you can regenerate one key while keeping the service running using the other key.

when turn on https, can we use certificate? or it is only helping to encrypt the whole content

Yes, you can use certificates. Jim Nakashima, of the Azure team, has a post about this on his Cloudy in Seattle blog. The API certificates referred to on the Azure portal are not for running HTTPS but for authenticating the Azure Service Management API.

Answer 2

Wow...thx for you quick answer Neil.

but the certificate from the blog, is for management API, i used it before..it was good...

however i mean when using Azure Storage API, can we use certificate as well???


-thx

Answer 3

when using Azure Storage API, can we use certificate as well???

No. You don't need to and, in fact, cannot use a certificate to authenticate to the Azure Storage Service. Instead you use the account/key combination to implement shared key authentication. If you use the raw REST API you need to do this yourself. However, the Storage Client API handles all this for you and you just need to provide the account name and key in a form it understands - typically in the Azure configuration file.