YubiHSM[1] seems much more reasonable at $500, but it's still not "cheap." A COTS implementation would be interesting. Securing SSL keys would require very qui

YubiHSM[1] seems much more reasonable at $500, but it's still not "cheap." A COTS implementation would be interesting. Securing SSL keys would require very quick public key crypto and probably a PCI-E interface to talk to the server, the PCI-E interface making it much more expensive (FPGAs with PCI-E hard blocks have gone down in price, but are by no means cheap, not to mention the increased cost of the PCB). Prototypes probably wouldn't need VC for a proof of concept, but after that you typically need to put up a bit of money for any manufacturing. I'd be interested in a way to securely generate and store a Root CA certificate and sign other keys with it. Ideally using something like secret sharing so that no single person can access the Root CA as well without having n out of m people. [1] http://www.yubico.com/products/yubihsm/ http://www.yubico.com/products/yubihsm/