All other technicalities aside it's rather interesting. From an HSM perspective it either makes that hardware now very useful or very useless. Think of a larg

All other technicalities aside it's rather interesting. From an HSM perspective it either makes that hardware now very useful or very useless. Think of a large organization - you've been there (or not), there are 30 internal applications with self-signed certificates. Fail. The organization had purchased an HSM, but never really got it deployed because - well, that was too complex and it didn't integrate well with 3rd party network hardware and failed miserably in your *nix web stack. This could be interesting - and I'm not commenting with regard to the efficacy or security concerns around this, but mainly the workflow simplicity it provides to large organizations who end up in self-signed-cert-hell because HSMs don't interoperate easily in a lot of use cases. But to my original statement - this is a very good thing or a very bad thing for Thales and the like. The only requirement for an actually certified HSM, really, is certification against some hardware and software standard you have a checkbox to fulfill. Beyond that this would be a killer in the middleground for those who want an HSM like functionality but don't have any requirements to meet other than housing a secure segment where key management can be done in a more controlled manner.