Viewing key versions

View the versions that are associated with a root key by using IBM® Key Protect for IBM Cloud®.

When you rotate a root key, Key Protect creates a new version of the key. As a security admin, you can audit the rotation history of a root key by viewing its key version history.

Key versions are available only for root keys. To learn more about how key rotation works in Key Protect, check out Comparing your key rotation options.

How many key versions do you have?

To see how many versions you have of each key you have deployed:

Log in to the IBM Cloud console.
Go to Menu > Resource List to view a list of your resources.
From your IBM Cloud resource list, select your provisioned instance of Key Protect.
On the Keys panel, click the ⋯ icon and select Key details. This opens a side panel that shows, among other things, the number of versions of this key you have.
If you want to know how many key versions you have in your instance, you must repeat this process for every key in your instance. Note that because only root keys can be rotated, all of your standard keys have only one version.

Viewing key versions with the API

For a high-level view, you can list the versions that are associated with a root key by making a GET call to the following endpoint.

https://<region>.kms.cloud.ibm.com/api/v2/keys/<keyID_or_alias>/versions

Retrieve your authentication credentials to work with keys in the service.
Retrieve the ID of the root key that you want to inspect.

The ID value is used to access detailed information about the key. You can find the ID for a key in your Key Protect instance by retrieving a list of your keys, or by accessing the Key Protect dashboard.

Get a list of versions that are associated with the root key by running the following curl command. You can also add a query parameter, ?totalCount=true, as shown, that returns totalCount in the response metadata for use with pagination.

$ curl -X GET \
    "https://<region>.kms.cloud.ibm.com/api/v2/keys/<keyID_or_alias>/versions?totalCount=<show_total>&allKeyStates=<work_for_keys_in_any_state>" \
    -H "accept: application/vnd.ibm.kms.key.version+json" \
    -H "authorization: Bearer <IAM_token>" \
    -H "x-kms-key-ring: <key_ring_ID>" \
    -H "bluemix-instance: <instance_ID>"

Replace the variables in the example request according to the following table.

Describes the variables that are needed to list key versions with the Key Protect API.
Variable	Description
region	Required. The region abbreviation, such as `us-south` or `eu-gb`, that represents the geographic area where your Key Protect instance resides. For more information, see Regional service endpoints.
keyID_or_alias	Required. The unique identifier or alias for the key that you want to inspect.
IAM_token	Required. Your IBM Cloud access token. Include the full contents of the IAM token, including the Bearer value, in the curl request. For more information, see Retrieving an access token.
instance_ID	Required. The unique identifier that is assigned to your Key Protect service instance. For more information, see Retrieving an instance ID.
key_ring_ID	Optional. The unique identifier of the key ring that the key is a part of. The header itself is optional, but if unspecified, Key Protect will search for the key in every key ring associated with the specified instance. It is recommended to specify the key ring ID for a more optimized request. Note: The key ring ID of keys that are created without an `x-kms-key-ring` header is: default. For more information, see Grouping keys.
show_total	Optional. If set to `true`, returns `totalCount` in the response metadata for use with pagination for all keys in an active state, unless `allKeyStates` is also set to true. The `totalCount` value returned specifies the total number of key versions that match the request, disregarding limit and offset. The default is set to false.
allKeyStates	Optional. If not set to true, an HTTP 409 is returned for all non-active keys.

A successful GET api/v2/keys/<keyID_or_alias>/versions response returns the list of versions that are associated with the root key. The following JSON object shows an example returned value.

{
    "metadata": {
        "collectionType": "application/vnd.ibm.kms.key.version+json",
        "collectionTotal": 2
    },
    "resources": [
        {
            "id": "02fd6835-6001-4482-a892-13bd2085f75d",
            "creationDate": "2020-03-05T16:39:25Z"
        },
        {
            "id": "12e8c9c2-a162-472d-b7d6-8b9a86b815a6",
            "creationDate": "2020-03-02T16:28:38Z"
        }
    ]
}

The resources object lists each key version, along with its ID and creation date, in reverse chronological order.