Key Protect

Key Protect is a cloud-based security service that provides life cycle management for encryption keys that are used in IBM Cloud services or customer-built applications. Key Protect provides roots of trust (RoT), backed by a hardware security module (HSM).

You can enable the security benefits of Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) by importing your own root of trust encryption keys, called Customer Root Keys (CRKs), into the service. With the Key Protect API, you can use a CRK to wrap (encrypt) and unwrap (decrypt) the keys that are associated with your data resources, so you control the security of your encrypted data in the cloud. Customers who want even more control over their encryption keys can deploy an HSM that they own and manage into a Satellite location and use it with Key Protect.

You can generate, store, and manage your keys with a secure, application-friendly, cloud-based key management solution for encryption keys.

Keys are secured by an HSM at FIPS-140-2 Level 3 encryption. Deleted keys can be purged after four hours or will be scheduled to be purged after 90 days. Purged keys cannot be recovered. All programmatic interfaces are secured by TLS and mutual authentication.

Whether you are a developer who requires only a few keys or a large enterprise that needs millions, Key Protect can scale to your needs.

When you write applications, Key Protect's standard programmatic APIs generate, store, retrieve, and manage your keys, independent of your application's logic. For example, you can create applications that encrypt data in custom databases, or use encrypted block storage in an application-specific format.