Cloud HSM: Our secure key management approach
Customers concerned about key management often require a HSM (hardware security module). They want the same level of key protection in the cloud as they do on-premises. An HSM provides guaranteed access to encrypted data by authorized users by storing mission-critical master encryption keys in HSM and backing it up. Powered by SafeNet’s HSM and hosted in geographically dispersed data centers under controlled environments independently validated for compliance, IBM Cloud HSM offers enterprises high-assurance protection for encryption keys and also helps customers meet their corporate, contractual, and regulatory compliance requirements.
You can easily order Cloud HSM through the SoftLayer customer portal or Softlayer APIs. A dedicated FIPS complaint HSM device will be provisioned inside your private network.
Your HSM access credentials that are provided to you are reset as part of your first login. This ensures that you are the only entity with access to your HSM functionality. SoftLayer is responsible for the management of the HSM in terms of health and uptime; this is done without access to the partitions, roles, keys stored and managed on the HSM. You are responsible for the use of the HSM to manage and backup the customer’s keys.
Cloud HSM supports a variety of use cases and applications, such as database encryption, digital rights management (DRM), public key infrastructure (PKI), authentication and authorization, document signing, and transaction processing. NAT and IP aliasing will not work with HSM, while BYOIP might be possible in future. Currently, HSM is not in federal data centers, but it certainly is on the roadmap.
Configuration
Cloud HSM is “used” and accessed in exactly the same way as an on-prem managed HSM.
As part of provisioning, you receive administrator credentials for the appliance, initialize the HSM, manage the HSM, create roles and create HSM partitions on the appliance. After creating HSM partitions, you can configure a Luna client (on a virtual server) that allows applications to use the APIs provided by the HSM. The cryptographic partition is a logical and physical security boundary whose knowledge is secure with the partition owner authorized by you. Any attempts to tamper the physical appliance will result in data being erased. Similarly incorrect attempts to login beyond a threshold will result in erasing partitions, hence we highly recommend backing up your keys.