Enterprise key management (EKM) refers to the practices, policies, and technologies to secure and manage encryption keys across enterprise infrastructure. It includes the centralized generation, distribution, storage, rotation, and revocation of encryption keys used to protect sensitive data at rest, in transit, and in use.

Organizations encounter numerous challenges when controlling and managing their encryption keys. They must effectively handle a significant volume of encryption keys utilized across diverse infrastructures. Secondly, protecting these keys from malicious insiders and external attackers is critical. Ensuring the enforcement of access control policies to safeguard data is another essential aspect.

Organizations must cater to the needs of multiple heterogeneous environments comprising various applications, databases, and standards. They must comply with regulatory requirements, adding another layer of complexity to their key management practices.

Many organizations lack comprehensive knowledge about their encryption keys, including their generation, storage locations, authorized access, designated purposes, regular updates, and secure backups.

EKM enables organizations to ensure data confidentiality, integrity, and availability while complying with various regulatory requirements. They can mitigate the risk of unauthorized access or data breaches and maintain control over their data throughout the infrastructure.

Enterprise Key Management ensures the security of sensitive data.

Encryption keys protect data from unauthorized access, and a robust key management system prevents key compromise, theft, or misuse.

Effective key management helps organizations meet regulatory compliance requirements, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or industry-specific standards like the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).

Centralized key management reduces complexity and improves operational effectiveness by offering seamless administration and control of encryption keys across the infrastructure.

Enterprise Key Manager offers the advantage of operating seamlessly across multiple locations and business units, making it especially valuable for large organizations with geographically dispersed offices or departments. This system facilitates consistent and secure encryption practices throughout the organization by enabling efficient key management and synchronization across various sites.

EKMS can integrate with third-party systems, including cloud services and encryption products, streamlining the overall security infrastructure. By interfacing with other data security solutions or applications, an EKMS enables a unified approach to key management, simplifying the process.

For instance, a multinational corporation can leverage an enterprise key management solution to generate and distribute encryption keys for securing email communications across its global offices. It can also oversee the encryption keys for databases containing sensitive customer information, ensuring the protection of such data.

When the organization adopts a cloud-based file storage solution, the EKMS can integrate with the cloud provider's encryption mechanisms, allowing centralized key management for securing files stored in the cloud.

EKM offers a centralized and standardized approach to managing encryption keys, guaranteeing proper key generation, storage, and protection throughout their lifecycle. This minimizes the potential for key mishandling, such as creating weak keys or unauthorized key usage.  

A centralized enterprise KMS simplifies compliance audits by automatically logging security operations and enforcing policies. It enables organizations to meet regulatory requirements like GDPR, CCPA, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, SOX, and security standards such as ISO and FIPS. 

EKM empowers organizations to retain complete control over their encryption keys for data sovereignty. Organizations can ensure that only authorized personnel can access and manage the keys by defining access controls and policies for key usage.  

EKM often integrates seamlessly with robust key management systems, encompassing key rotation, versioning, and revocation functionalities. Organizations can effortlessly restore lost or compromised keys when needed by implementing regular automated backup and recovery procedures. These capabilities improve the security posture of cloud data by facilitating regular key updates, mitigating key compromises, and maintaining robust encryption practices. 

Some of the challenges in enterprise key management include:

• Resource Intensive and Complex: It involves maintaining strong security measures and allocating enough time and effort to manage the entire key management process across hybrid environments.
• Scalability: As organizations expand globally, there's a need to manage a large volume of encryption keys across various systems and applications.
• Compliance: Key management practices and audits follow strict regimes and procedures and will not surpass any policy-compromising data.
• Integration: It demands substantial effort to ensure the key management system is compatible with the existing systems and technologies and creates no disruption to operations.
• Access and Authorization: It needs to strike the right balance between security and usability, i.e., granting sufficient access for authorized personnel while preventing unauthorized individuals from gaining control over encryption keys.
• Key Storage: It requires safeguarding encryption keys in tamper-proof devices to protect them from physical and logical attacks, insider threats, or unauthorized access.
• Key Recovery: It involves complex processes, such as verifying the person's identity requesting key recovery, and ensuring proper authorization. Poor recovery and backup mechanisms can create vulnerabilities and weaken overall security.
• Key Synchronization: Establishing a standardized approach, managing the dynamic nature of modern IT environments leading to discrepancies in key management practices and distributed or decentralized infrastructures, such as cloud environments or hybrid setups, complicate synchronization.

Enterprise Key Management begins with key generation. Secure methods such as key generators, AES encryption algorithms, or random number generators are commonly employed. Organizations must ensure the security of the location where the key is generated to avoid becoming vulnerable or rendering it unsuitable for encryption.

Following key generation, the next step in the key lifecycle is the secure distribution of keys. Keys must be distributed to authorized users through encrypted connections like TLS or SSL to safeguard their confidentiality. Implementing measures to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks is paramount in maintaining the integrity of key distribution processes.

Once keys are distributed, they are utilized for cryptographic operations. Only authorized users must be able to access the keys to prevent misuse.

After encryption, the keys must be securely stored to facilitate future decryption. The most secure storage methods include Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) or Cloud HSMs. Alternatively, if the keys are utilized in a cloud environment, the External Key Management Service provided by the Cloud Service Provider can be leveraged to ensure secure key storage.

Key rotation becomes necessary when a key reaches the end of its crypto period, which refers to the time period during which the key remains valid. Rotating keys involves retiring and replacing the old key with a new one. The data encrypted with the old key is first decrypted and then re-encrypted using the new key. Regular key rotation mitigates the risk associated with prolonged key usage, reducing the likelihood of key theft or compromise. In cases where a key is suspected to be compromised, key rotation may occur before the crypto period expires.

In case of a compromised key, two approaches can be taken: key revocation or key destruction.

Revoking a key render, it unusable for encrypting or decrypting data, even if its crypto period is still valid. On the other hand, key destruction involves permanently deleting the key from the key manager database or any other storage system. This irreversible action makes key recreation impossible, except when a backup image is available.

The NIST establishes standards and regulations such as PCI DSS, FIPS, and HIPAA require organizations to comply with best practices for maintaining the security of cryptographic keys used to safeguard sensitive data. Following are the popular practices.

Use Hardware Security Modules (HSMs): HSMs are physical devices designed to store cryptographic keys and perform cryptographic operations on-site. Stealing keys from an HSM requires physically removing the device from the premises, acquiring a quorum of access cards needed to access the HSM, and bypassing the encryption algorithm protecting the keys. HSMs SaaS is equally effective when the organization owns the key.

Practice the least privilege: Users should only have access to essential keys for their work. This approach ensures better tracking of key usage. If a key is misused or compromised, the number of individuals with access to the key is limited, narrowing down the suspect pool in case of a breach within the organization.

Implement automation: It ensures that keys do not exceed their crypto period or become excessively used. Other aspects of the key lifecycle, such as key creation, regular backups, distribution, revocation, and destruction, can also be automated.

Separate duties: One person may be assigned to authorize new user access to keys, another to distribute the keys, and a third person to create the keys. This division of duties prevents the first person from stealing the key during distribution or learning the key's value during generation.

Avoid hard-coding keys: Hard-coding a key in open-source or any other code grants access to the key value to anyone with access to that code, leading to the possibility of the sensitive data leak.

Quorum Approval: Instead of one individual approving the complete key usage, multiple individuals must come together to validate consent. This ensures peer accountability and mitigates the risk if one portion of the key is compromised.

Enforce policies: Creating and enforcing security policies pertaining to encryption keys is another effective approach many organizations employ to ensure the safety and compliance of their key management system. Security policies define the methods everyone within the organization must adhere to, providing an additional means of tracking who can access certain keys and recording key-related activities.

Enterprise key management (EKM) can be integrated with existing systems. Here are some general considerations and approaches:

Compatibility: Industry-standard encryption algorithms and key management protocols are typically compatible with databases, applications, storage systems, or cloud platforms.

API or SDK Integration: Many EKM solutions provide APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) or SDKs (Software Development Kits) that allow developers to integrate the EKM functionality into their applications or systems.

Cryptographic Libraries: Some EKM solutions offer cryptographic libraries that provide an interface for performing encryption and decryption operations using keys managed by the EKM system. You can add encryption capabilities to your applications without significant code changes.

Encryption Proxy or Gateway: These intermediaries' function between applications and the underlying data storage or communication systems. They intercept encryption and decryption requests and then route them through the EKM solution for key management and cryptographic operations.

Vendor-specific Integration: These could include plugins, connectors, or extensions that facilitate integration with commonly used systems or platforms.

Several compliance considerations should be considered when implementing key management practices:

Regulatory Alignment: Ensure key management practices align with regulations such as GDPR, PCI DSS, HIPAA, or others and incorporate the necessary controls to meet compliance requirements. Enforce key expiration policies to prevent using outdated or compromised keys.

Documentation and Policies: Maintain comprehensive documentation of key management processes, policies, and procedures. Clearly define roles, responsibilities, and access controls associated with key management. Document key generation, distribution, rotation, revocation, and destruction procedures. This documentation serves as evidence of compliance efforts during audits or regulatory inspections.

Security Controls: Use secure key storage mechanisms such as Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) or trusted key management servers. Apply strong access controls, such as role-based access and least privilege principles, to ensure only authorized individuals can access and manage keys.

Auditing and Monitoring: Maintain logs of key management activities, including key generation, distribution, usage, rotation, and destruction. Review logs to detect anomalies, suspicious activities, or unauthorized key access. Engage independent auditors if necessary to validate compliance efforts and provide assurance to stakeholders.

Incident Response and Reporting: Develop an incident response plan with procedures for addressing key compromises, breaches, or security incidents. Clearly define roles and responsibilities for reporting incidents to relevant authorities or regulators as per compliance obligations. Define guidelines for prompt investigation and action.

Third-Party Considerations: Implement appropriate contractual agreements with third-party key management services and conduct regular assessments to verify ongoing compliance. Conduct due diligence to ensure they meet necessary compliance standards. Evaluate their security controls, certifications, and adherence to industry best practices.

Data Encryption and Decryption: Implement secure encryption and decryption processes to protect all data at rest, in transit, and especially when data is in use.

Enterprise Key Management systems are designed with robust key recovery and backup mechanisms, ensuring that encrypted data can be recovered even if a key is lost. These systems allow authorized personnel to restore keys from backups or perform key recovery procedures.

The backup mechanisms within the EKM system allow for regular and secure backups of encryption keys, ensuring that a copy of the key is always available for recovery purposes.

By promptly recovering the lost key, businesses can continue operations without experiencing data loss or disruptions. These systems are designed to be reliable, secure, and efficient in handling key recovery scenarios, giving organizations the confidence to rely on their encrypted data protection infrastructure.

Here's how EKM addresses these challenges:

Centralized Key Management: Organizations can control from a single point to create and deploy consistent key management policies across multiple cloud providers.

Key Lifecycle Management: EKM ensures that keys are created securely, appropriately distributed to authorized entities, regularly rotated to mitigate risks, and promptly revoked when necessary.

Key Encryption: EKM Consider adopting Encryption as a Service and hardware security modules (HSMs) and HSM SaaS to store keys securely and protect them from unauthorized access or tampering.

Integration with Cloud Providers: EKM systems integrate with different cloud service providers' key management APIs, allowing organizations to leverage native key management capabilities provided by the cloud platform.

Key Isolation and Segregation: Organizations can establish separate cryptographic domains for each cloud provider. The keys remain securely stored, managed, and accessed within their respective domains. EKM ensures that keys used for different purposes or by different applications are kept separate to prevent unauthorized access.

Compliance and Auditability: EKM systems provide detailed audit logs and reports supporting compliance requirements that enable organizations to demonstrate key management practices, meet regulatory obligations, and easily undergo audits.

Scalability and Flexibility: EKM systems are designed to scale and adapt to the dynamic nature of multi-cloud environments. They can manage large volumes of keys and seamlessly add or remove cloud providers or services when needed.

Key Recovery and Backup: EKM systems often include key recovery and backup mechanisms. In case of key loss or accidental deletion, these systems allow authorized personnel to restore keys from backups or perform key recovery procedures, minimizing the risk of data loss.

The following are some of the widely recognized standards in the field of enterprise key management:

• Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP), an OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) standard that defines a communication protocol between key management clients and servers, enabling interoperability and simplifying the integration.
• The NIST Special Publication 800-57 guidelines recommend cryptographic key management in federal systems.
• FIPS 140-2 is a U.S. government standard specifying the security requirements for cryptographic modules that protect sensitive information.
• ISO/IEC 27001 is an international standard that outlines the requirements for establishing, implementing, maintaining, and continually improving a data security management system.
• The OASIS Enterprise Key Management Framework (EKMF) Technical Committee develops standards and specifications for managing cryptographic keys in enterprise environments.

Encryption is a highly effective data protection solution that embeds security at the data level, making it unreadable without the appropriate decryption key.

Data encryption and the management of cryptographic keys take place in various locations, including databases, unstructured files, Hardware Security Modules (HSMs), on-premises, public and private cloud services, and Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms.

Fortanix offers a unique solution called Enterprise Key "Posture" Management (EKPM), providing a more intelligent, data-centric approach to Enterprise Key Management (EKM). This helps discover, assess, and mitigate data encryption risks across a hybrid multicloud environment.

Fortanix Enterprise Key Posture Management (EKPM) simplifies discovery and visibility by offering a centralized view of keys and services, including key details such as encryption status, rotation frequency, service/key mapping, key source, and algorithm types across a hybrid multicloud infrastructure, supporting security and compliance teams.

The consolidated view of security postures helps mitigate the negative impact, reducing the risk of data exposure and operational disruptions. This enables organizations to focus on strategic improvements in overall data security.

Fortanix Enterprise Key Posture Management (EKPM) offers a unique aggregated view and alerting system that highlights the most significant data security risks. It allows organizations to quickly assess their security posture and track its improvement over time, providing valuable insights for risk mitigation.

Fortanix enables organizations to quickly demonstrate their compliance with policies and regulations through detailed reporting. This includes key rotation alignment with standards such as NIST or internal policies, providing a comprehensive view of compliance status.

Fortanix Enterprise Key Posture Management (EKPM) helps organizations align with established regulatory and data security policies and standards, such as those outlined by NIST, by offering an intelligent, scalable, data-centric approach to Enterprise Key Management. Fortanix provides security teams with the necessary tools to discover, assess, and remediate data encryption risks. This ensures that security teams can validate and monitor the usage of keys across the organization, ultimately contributing to a more secure and compliant data environment.

Fortanix Enterprise Key Posture Management (EKPM) streamlines the manual correlation and analysis of at-risk data security gaps by aligning them with established regulatory and data security policies and standards. This simplification saves time and increases granularity.

Fortanix's Enterprise Key Posture Management (EKPM) data-driven insights and context-rich information enable organizations to prioritize the most harmful risks efficiently. This ensures quick remediation, reducing the overall negative impact on security and compliance.

Manual discovery processes often involve tools like Excel and custom scripts, creating complex and time-consuming workflows. Fortanix Enterprise Key Posture Management (EKPM) simplifies these processes by providing automated solutions, eliminating the need for manual intervention, and streamlining the implementation and tracking of remediations at scale.

Fortanix Enterprise Key Posture Management (EKPM) can simplify corrective actions such as auto-rotation, disablement, and deletion of keys. This improves data security posture and strengthens key lifecycle management.

Fortanix Enterprise Key Posture Management (EKPM) offers a visible audit log and the ability to roll back changes, addressing the challenge of unforeseen operational impacts. This ensures transparency, accountability, and quick recovery in case of unexpected issues.

Inefficient use of security personnel stalls an organization's ability to focus on more strategic security initiatives. This inefficiency increases operational costs and talent attrition, impeding overall security effectiveness.

Fortanix's Enterprise Key Posture Management (EKPM) optimizes security personnel resources by automating the discovery of encryption keys and related data services, enabling a more strategic allocation of personnel to high-impact security initiatives.

Yes, Fortanix Enterprise Key Posture Management (EKPM) is designed to facilitate automation initiatives with a REST API, and interfaces such as KMIP, PKCS #11, JCE, UDF, and many others. This ensures a cohesive and comprehensive approach to data security management within an organization's existing infrastructure.

Yes, Fortanix Enterprise Key Posture Management (EKPM) integrates with leading SIEM and SOAR solutions, providing temper-resistant log analytics capabilities for comprehensive security monitoring.

Yes, Fortanix Enterprise Key Posture Management (EKPM) offers integrated service ticketing workflows to automate remediation via seamless integration with third-party IT ticketing systems, such as ServiceNow.

Encryption, in simpler terms, means converting plain text into gibberish (known as ciphertext) based on algorithms. Organizations use encryption to protect sensitive data such as personal information, passwords, and secrets. It secures and improves the security of communication between client apps and servers.

For example, suppose someone gets access to the encrypted data (the ciphertext). In that case, if not authorized to decrypt the data, the entity cannot make sense of the information and practically cannot use it. This ciphertext can be decrypted only with data encryption keys.

Key management includes creating, storing, managing, using, controlling, and destroying encryption keys. The key management strategy is critical because it protects data integrity, and confidentiality and the encryption key are stored with the data in the cloud for complex production environments.

The best Key management practice is when an organization has complete control of its keys. The prime action is to separate keys from data for more control, backup, and disaster recovery.

A more effective solution is the external key management system. Nearly all cloud vendors allow this setup. For example, the Key Management Software as a Service (SaaS).

In this buyer's guide for Modern Key Management and Data Security, we have listed the questions you can pose to vendors and the most critical capabilities to look for when evaluating a key management system.

The Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP) makes it easier to share cryptographic keys, certificates, and secrets between different systems. This means your data stays secure no matter what platform you use.  

The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) plays a key role in developing and governing KMIP. As a non-profit group, OASIS is about creating, aligning, and adopting open standards for managing and securing data.

By overseeing KMIP, OASIS ensures the protocol stays strong, works well with other systems, and keeps up with the latest security and technology. This oversight helps KMIP remain a trusted standard for secure key management, promoting teamwork and consistency among different systems and vendors.  

By setting these communication standards, KMIP lets various key management solutions work together smoothly, offering a unified way to handle cryptographic assets. This kind of interoperability is essential for keeping data secure and intact, especially when multiple systems and devices need to work together.  

KMIP simplifies protecting sensitive information, allowing organizations to deploy and maintain strong encryption strategies without being tied to one vendor's ecosystem. This standardization allows systems from different providers to speak the same "language," ensuring that cryptographic data transfer is seamless and interoperable.

For instance, through KMIP, a centralized key management system can consolidate an organization's encryption elements, such as symmetric keys, asymmetric keys, digital certificates, and authentication tokens, resolving the complexity of using multiple key management solutions. 

KMIP gives you full control, flexibility, and visibility over key lifecycle management without losing performance or security.

Symmetric encryption allows only one key (a secret key) to encrypt and decrypt data. Both keys represent a common code/secret shared between the sender and the intended recipient/s to secure information.

Symmetric encryption is faster and uses fewer resources. The encrypted and plain text is the same in length. The length of the key used is 128 or 256 bits.

It is efficient to handle a large amount of data. For example, payment transactions, user validation, hashing, etc. However, the symmetric key is less secure because the secret key is shared between the sender and receiver and can be easily hacked.

Some examples of symmetric encryption algorithms include AES (Advanced Encryption Standard), DES (Data Encryption Standard), IDEA (International Data Encryption Algorithm), Blowfish (Drop-in replacement for DES or IDEA), RC4 (Rivest Cipher 4), RC5 (Rivest Cipher 5), RC6 (Rivest Cipher 6).

Asymmetric encryption uses a pair of keys. Each pair consists of a public and private key. The sender uses the receiver’s public key for encryption, and the receiver uses its private key for decryption.

The public keys can be accessed by anyone for encryption. however, a private key is kept secret and was issued, and is managed by an authorized entity.

Asymmetric keys are used to authenticate users, verify data integrity, and secure symmetric encryption.

For example, the HTTPS padlock symbol on a website URL indicates the website uses SSL/TLS certificates. It means when a user connects to a website, SSL/TLS encrypts communications between a user and a website server.

It uses asymmetric key encryption to verify the identity of the server so that the user can then communicate with the website using the symmetric exchange of keys.

The asymmetric encryption process becomes slow because it utilizes more resources, and the key length is 2048 or higher. As a result, it is used to transfer small amounts of data.

Some examples of asymmetric encryption algorithms include Diffie-Hellman, An Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), El Gamal, Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA), and Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA).

Key Management Service (KMS) with HSM grade security allows organizations to generate, store, and use crypto keys, certificates, and secrets.

A centralized Key Management Service provides control and visibility into key management operations across all data sources, whether on any cloud, or on-prem, using a centralized web-based UI with enterprise-level access controls and single sign-in support.

The "single pane of glass" delivers simplified administration and increased control, which includes extensive logging and auditing across the entire infrastructure.

Here are some critical requirements for a centralized KMS. It must be built to scale horizontally and geographically. It must offer automated load balancing, fault tolerance, disaster recovery, and high availability.

Business critical apps can integrate using traditional crypto interfaces or restful APIs. A unified policy management and quorum approvals can integrate seamlessly with existing authentication identity providers.

Key Lifecycle Management includes creating, maintaining, protecting, and deleting cryptographic keys.

Keys expire or become vulnerable over a period. Their shelf life decreases because of continuous usage and an increased number of authorized users.

A process commonly known as "key rollover" generates new keys (symmetric or asymmetric key pair) to replace ones already in use.

These new cryptographic keys are available to a limited number of users, and the access is further extended to other users depending on their roles in an organization.

Key Lifecycle Management ensures that only users with authorization can access data, allowing organizations to get complete hold of data security.

Multi-cloud management includes full cryptographic key lifecycle management as a service to ensure secure and consistent key management across several cloud environments, including bring your own key (BYOK) and key management service (BYOKMS).

Organizations need a single point of control and management at scale across multiple public cloud and hybrid environments because it is complex to manage encryption, key management, secrets management, and tokenization in a unique way for every public cloud.

They can implement a Key Management System (with capabilities like BYOK) that can connect to clouds and set consistent policies across cloud environments from one single console.

A SaaS-based data security model is easier to integrate with apps, IT infrastructure, and services and requires no specialized skills for deployment.

Organizations can deploy a zero-trust architecture (ZTA) with quorum approval capabilities that ensure access to only authorized users to manage a particular data set and can microsegment the permissions granted for data access.

Organizations can achieve more control over their data and keys with Bring Your Own Key (BYOK). They can import the master key, which the cloud providers store in their key management system and encrypts all Data Encryption Keys (DEKs) under that key.