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Reminds me of a Thales rack mount HSM the former security architect of CVS Caremark told me they deployed back in the 2000s. There were two of them in a datacet
by evanjrowley 2mo ago
Reminds me of a Thales rack mount HSM the former security architect of CVS Caremark told me they deployed back in the 2000s. There were two of them in a dataceter used for a their transaction processing. One day, someone accidentally bumped into the rack where both HSMs were mounted, and they physically self-destructed, causing a major incident.
- zbentley 2mo agoOne hopes that there were recovery keys or equivalent in a fireproof safe offsite somewhere.
- pseudohadamard 2mo agoIf there were two HSMs then probably not. The reason why you buy two is to clone one into the other so that if one fails you can use the other. And then you hope and pray that the first one never, ever fails because the chances of successfully switching over to the second one and continuing operations as before are... slim.
- beardedwizard 2mo agoI did some work at a large saas company where HSM as a big part of what we did. In the early days, we paid for full HSMs that we managed and eventually had to make a decision on whether or not we would used managed HSM and HSM-like services like KMS across various cloud providers. We did an analysis across all the HSM hardware vendors and found, unsurprisingly in hindsight, that all of these hardware vendors had all the same awful security practices as every other enterprise hardware vendor, and each had vulnerabilities that leaked private key material. The conclusion was that cloud providers fronting managed HSM had more to lose than the hardware vendors did, and would be more likely to patch and address these kinds of issues. What surprised me was my own reaction, I thought for sure managing our own HSM hardware had to be a better guarantee over the key material, but like many things, it turned out to be unscalable security theater.