Amazon adding TPM-like facilities to the cloud?

Posted by Ken Y-N on March 10th, 2010 at 03:59pm

Steve Riley, Amazon Web Services (AWS) evangelist, at the recent RSA Conference discussed managed encryption services. He talked about having either a hardware security module (HSM) or a software key store in the cloud accessible via an API. There was this comment from the floor:

A security strategist with a well-known online payment service said that HSMs did not solve the problem entirely and might be difficult to scale. He suggested AWS create key servers in memory rather than on disk. A passphrase would then be required to access the HSM and pull out the required key.

That quote makes little sense to me, and I’m surprised that there was no mention of virtualisation of the HSM – a quick search of the web reveals a good number of people working on virtualisation schemes for the Trusted Platform Module.

Tags: amazon

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