A method and system for persisting and recovering security keys in order to authorize access to a network system is disclosed. Certain security keys are read from a file with root as the effictive user id in order to enable the reading of the keys. The certain security keys are placed into a local cache by the read process. If there are no errors in the read process, the certain security keys will preferably include a private key. If the private key is not in the cache (e.g., because there was an error in the read process) the authorization fails.