Hardware security modules

A hardware security module (HSM) is a physical computing device that is specifically designed to store secret keys, and it provides various crypto processing functionalities.

One of the key features of HSM is tamper protection. This means that if anyone tries to physically tamper the device (tries to open it), then HSM will automatically delete the key.

Since HSM plays a critical role in mission-critical applications, they are generally certified against international standard certification such as FIPS 140.

The challenges with HSM in on-premise

Many organizations used HSM for their on-premise data center environments. However, when they migrate to the cloud, having HSM on-premise leads to some network bottlenecks. Let's understand why in the following diagram.

In the following scenario, we have the infrastructure in the cloud environment and HSM in the on-premise environment.

Every time the application wants to run operations such as encrypt and decrypt, the data has...