Toward scaling hardware security module for emerging cloud services

Abstract

The hardware security module (HSM) has been used as a root of trust for various key management services. At the same time, rapid innovation in emerging industries, such as container-based microservices, accelerates demands for scaling security services. However, current on-premises HSMs have limitations to afford such demands due to the restricted scalability and high price of deployment. This paper presents ScaleTrust, a framework for scaling security services by utilizing HSMs with SGX-based key management service (KMS) in a collaborative, yet secure manner. Based on a hierarchical model, we design a cryptographic workload distribution between HSMs and KMS enclaves to achieve both the elasticity of cloud software and the hardware-based security of HSM appliances. We demonstrate practical implications of ScaleTrust using two case studies that require secure cryptographic operations with low latency and high scalability.