Don't expect them to be much faster than a regular Xeon CPU however. The main selling aspect is to avoid your private keys from being leaked to the world. For

Don't expect them to be much faster than a regular Xeon CPU however. The main selling aspect is to avoid your private keys from being leaked to the world. For that there is all sort of tamper proofing on usually what is a PCIe card. They can also be sold as appliances. Also, they tend to be a bit crappy. I had a really bad experience with Safenet Luna SE at my last job. The thing was buggy as hell, performance tended to be random between devices and on the security side, it was a CentOS 6.0 (with no updates) and a custom kernel driver + some userland tools which strangely enough, creates devices under /dev that were world writable... The Luna SA seemed better, but their rackmount appliances where nothing to be proud of: cheap 1U chassis, with regular desktop parts (micro ATX motherboard, a cheap celeron, non ECC RAM). The one we opened with quite old however (Luna SA 4 IIRC). The Thales ones seemed better at least in term of finish. The base appliance seemed to be of overall far better quality (sturdier case). But I didn't play with it, so no opinions on overall performance and ease of use.