Why a vHSM

Key Management Challenges

Deploying cloud-native applications introduces new challenges in key, identity, and access management, as well as key protection mechanisms such as Hardware Security Modules and Bring Your Own Key. These challenges become particularly pronounced in multi-cloud environments, where traditional solutions often fall short.

Some of the key problems include:

• Single Point of Trust: Single Point of Trust: Organizations must ultimately trust the cloud service provider (CSP) to securely manage their keys and identity systems in a "take-it-or-leave-it" approach. This trust extends to the CSP’s internal personnel, including engineers, DevOps, and DevSecOps teams, who may have access to these systems. As a result, organizations must accept the potential risks associated with having multiple, often unknown, individuals who might gain access to their sensitive data and services.

• Single Point of Attack: CSPs handle a vast number of clients, making them attractive targets for attacks, espionage, or compromise. In the past, targeting individual businesses required substantial effort and resources, but with the shift to cloud services, the economics of attacks have changed. Once attackers find vulnerabilities in a CSP's infrastructure, they can potentially gain access to multiple organizations at once. This was demonstrated in high-profile incidents like the STORM attack, where businesses suffered data breaches not because they were directly targeted, but because they were collateral damage of a larger attack on the CSP itself.

• Single Point of Ecosystem: CSPs promote their extensive portfolios of managed services, creating a comprehensive ecosystem that often leads to vendor lock-in. As organizations increasingly adopt cloud solutions, they risk becoming overly dependent on a specific provider's proprietary tools, APIs, and architectures. This dependency makes it difficult and costly to switch to other cloud platforms, limiting operational flexibility and long-term competitiveness. Although cloud platforms offer scalability and innovation, vendor lock-in can inflate costs, reduce adaptability, and prevent organizations from leveraging better technologies available from other providers.

“Bring Your Own Key” is Misleading in the Cloud

Bring Your Own Key allows organizations to generate and manage their own encryption keys and upload them to a cloud service provider for encrypting their data in the cloud. While this approach gives a sense of control, it has limitations that can make it less secure than it seems. The primary reasons why BYOK can be seen as misleading or inadequate in the cloud are:

1. Cloud Provider Control: Despite the idea of BYOK giving organizations control over their keys, once the keys are uploaded to the cloud provider, they are still managed by the provider's infrastructure. This means the cloud service provider still has significant access and control over key management, encryption processes, and underlying systems. While cloud providers claim that the keys are securely stored in Hardware Security Modules, the organization must still trust that the CSP’s administrators, internal teams, and service architectures do not have access to the keys or misuse them.

2. Key Access by Cloud Personnel: Even though cloud providers put security measures in place, there's always the risk of insider threats or vulnerabilities within the provider’s infrastructure. Administrators, engineers, or external actors with privileged access to cloud environments could potentially gain access to the encryption keys or the encrypted data, breaking the security perimeter intended by BYOK.

3. No Control Over Operational Processes: BYOK assumes that the cloud provider’s operational processes (e.g., backups, replication, or monitoring) are secure and flawless. However, organizations do not have visibility into how the CSP handles these processes. If a CSP needs to access encrypted data for backup or maintenance purposes, they could potentially decrypt the data using the provided key, compromising the entire security model of BYOK.

4. Shared Infrastructure Risks: Cloud services often run on shared infrastructure, where multiple clients’ data resides on the same physical hardware. Even if keys are separate, a breach at the hardware or hypervisor level could expose both the keys and the encrypted data. BYOK does not address these shared infrastructure vulnerabilities.