Shhh...KMS: A clever solution to hold all your secrets

High security for sensitive data

Any company that runs business-critical applications and works with sensitive data relies on a large number of keys and certificates. It is critical to security that these are well secured and meticulous control is exercised over who has access and who uses them. However, such security management can become quite complex.

Central instance for management

Wouldn't it be great to manage cryptographic keys and certificates centrally? Well, that is just the thing! What is needed for this is a powerful key management system to take care of the secrets. A secret can be a username with password, but also a key or a certificate. Obviously, this information should not be stored in any configuration file or as part of the source code.

The task of a KMS is therefore to manage which application and with which role has access to a secret from where and to store these secrets securely. The KMS logs every access and thus allows monitoring of the use of keys. Furthermore, a KMS enables the validity of the cryptographic algorithms used to be monitored centrally.

KMS as a Service

All this sounds fairly complicated and expensive - but it doesn't have to be! What if KMS were available as a service? That's exactly what we have: With HashiCorp's Vault solution, apectra can now offer KMS as a Service.This gives our customers full control over their secrets and encrypted data without having to set up and run complicated and costly systems themselves. KMS, by the way, is just one element of HashiCorp's Vault. In upcoming articles, we will introduce other services such as Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) or KMIP.

Interested in Key Management as a Service? Get in touch with us!

In the following whiteboard video, Armon Dadgar, founder and Co-CTO of HashiCorp, gives a comprehensive introduction to Vault and its functionality: