What is HSM?

Securely managing keys is one of the most important and resource consuming tasks required to guarantee the security on a public key crypto system. This is due to a close relationship between security and the proper management of private keys. A public key crypto system can be considered secure as long as the private keys are secured. Taking this as a premise, it should be guaranteed that a (private) key is strictly secure during all events in its life cycle. This goal can be achieved by designing systems to securely create, manage and destroy (private) keys, maintaining an audit trail of every operation which was done during their existence. Such systems are known as Hardware Security Modules (HSMs).

 

HSMs are specialised tamper-proof devices in which cryptographic functions and embedded software have been built to properly manage keys and control their life cycles. They are designed in such a way that if an unauthorised attempt to access them is made, this is considered an attempt to tamper and all critical internal parameters and keys are destroyed.

 

Although very common in the banking industry, HSMs are also desirable in PKI, but not always implemented. As shown in Table 1, their common usage in the banking industry leads to specialisation of the HSMs to perform tasks such as PIN calculations or payment protocols, that are suitable in such industry.

In this project, it will be tried to develop a PKI HSM. The goals of this HSM are :

  • onboard secure generation
  • onboard secure storage
  • use of cryptographic and sensitive data material
  • offloading application servers for complete asymmetric and symmetric cryptography

HSMs provide both logical and physical protection of these materials from non-authorized use and potential adversaries. In short, they protect high-value cryptographic keys.