"AWS KMS is designed so that no one, including AWS employees, can retrieve your plaintext CMKs from the service. The service uses hardware security modules (HSMs) that have been validated under FIPS 140-2, or are in the process of being validated, to protect the confidentiality and integrity of your keys regardless of whether you use AWS KMS or AWS CloudHSM to create your keys or you import them into the service yourself. Your plaintext CMKs never leave the HSMs, are never written to disk and are only ever used in the volatile memory of the HSMs for the time needed to perform your requested cryptographic operation. AWS KMS keys are never transmitted outside of the AWS regions in which they were created. Updates to software on the service hosts and to the AWS KMS HSM firmware is controlled by multi-party access control that is audited and reviewed by an independent group within Amazon as well as a NIST-certified lab in compliance with FIPS 140-2."[1]
Re:PIA open-sources and announces audit plans
by Abishek_Muthian on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @01:00AM
(#21822256)
EC2 sends DEK(Data Encryption Key) from the volume Metadata to the KMS (Key Management Service), KMS decrypts the DEK with CMS(Customer Master Keys), EC2 stores the decrypted DEK in hypervisor memory to decrypt the volume.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:PIA open-sources and announces audit plans
by core-questions on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @01:10PM
(#21827534)
Something somewhere has access to the key, though, unless somehow it's always escrowed instead a Secure Enclave / TPM / similar.
Re:PIA open-sources and announces audit plans
by admax88q on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @01:08AM
(#21822289)
Who owns the hypervisor memory?
Re:PIA open-sources and announces audit plans
by Abishek_Muthian on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @01:14AM
(#21822320)
The same entity which owns every other hardware in this infrastructure.
Re:PIA open-sources and announces audit plans
by mirimir on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @01:53AM
(#21822498)
So then "Amazon could still access it", right?
Re:PIA open-sources and announces audit plans
by Abishek_Muthian on Thursday December 19, 2019 @12:03AM
(#21832096)
According to Amazon,