Category: AWS CloudHSM

As you prepare to build or migrate your workload on Amazon Web Services (AWS), designing your encryption scheme can be a challenging—and sometimes confusing—endeavor. This blog post gives you a framework to select the right AWS cryptographic services and tools for your application to help you with your journey. I share common repeatable cryptographic patterns, […]

Customers use code signing certificates to digitally sign software, documents, and other certificates. Signing is a cryptographic tool that lets users verify that the code hasn’t been altered and that the software, documents or other certificates can be trusted. This blog post shows you how to configure your applications so you can use a key […]

In this post, I review the options you have to protect your customer data when migrating or building new databases in Amazon Web Services (AWS). I focus on how you can support sensitive workloads in ways that help you maintain compliance and regulatory obligations, and meet security objectives. Understanding transparent data encryption I commonly see […]

You can use AWS CloudHSM to help manage your encryption keys on FIPS 140-2 Level 3 validated hardware security modules (HSMs). AWS recommends running a high-availability production architecture with at least two CloudHSM HSMs in different Availability Zones. Although many workloads must be available 24/7, quality assurance or development environments typically do not have this […]

Encryption is a critical component of a defense-in-depth strategy, which is a security approach with a series of defensive mechanisms designed so that if one security mechanism fails, there’s at least one more still operating. As more organizations look to operate faster and at scale, they need ways to meet critical compliance requirements and improve […]

AWS CloudHSM is a cloud-based hardware security module (HSM) that enables you to generate and use your own encryption keys on the AWS Cloud. With CloudHSM, you can manage your own encryption keys using FIPS 140-2 Level 3 validated HSMs. CloudHSM also automatically manages synchronization, high availability and failover within a cluster. When the service […]

In August 2017, we announced the “new” AWS CloudHSM service, which had a lot of improvements over AWS CloudHSM Classic (for clarity in this post I will refer to the services as New CloudHSM and CloudHSM Classic). These advantages in security, scalability, usability, and economy, included FIPS 140-2 Level 3 certification, fully managed high availability […]

August 6, 2019: We’ve made an update to clarify use cases for VPC peering. If your organization is using software as a service (SaaS), your data is likely stored and protected by the SaaS provider. However, depending on the type of data that your organization stores and the compliance requirements that it must meet, you […]

Note from July 18, 2019: We added information about AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) Private Certificate Authority (CA) to the introduction. Is your on-premises Hardware Security Module (HSM) at end-of-life? Does continued maintenance of your on-premises hardware take a lot of time and cost a lot of money? You should consider migrating your workloads to AWS […]

Note: BYOK is helpful for certain use cases, but I recommend that you familiarize yourself with KMS best practices before you adopt this approach. You can review best practices in the AWS Key Management Services Best Practices (.pdf) whitepaper. May 14, 2019: We’ve updated a sentence to clarify that this solution does not include instructions […]