What is involved in checking a key management system for compliance?
A key management system should be audited periodically to ensure that it complies with the standards set by governing authorities. All keys in any type of system must be managed according to the guidelines set by compliance requirements, both internally and externally. This is becoming the determining factor in how keys are managed. Each of the stages within the life cycle of keys must be checked for security with particular administrative tasks. The auditing process will vary depending on the industry, the type of environment, and other factors. The process of documenting and proving compliance can be very difficult and costly for an organization. The actual implementation of the system is often simple in comparison.
Compliance measures can be simplified
The White Paper "Key Management Compliance - Explained" by Cryptomathic provides an overview of the scope of key management compliance requirements, and how they affect the architecture of key management solutions. The complexity of the auditing procedures for achieving compliance can be greatly reduced by following the given recommendations by the White Paper.
Importance of understanding the scope of compliance measures
In order to avoid excessive costs and overhead when implementing a particular key management solution, it is important to get an understanding of key management compliance requirements before much thought has been given to the implementation. Organizations need to understand exactly what is necessary to achieve compliance, and then design their system accordingly, while considering the environment and processes within scope.
Centralized and Automated Key Management
The White Paper also shows that using a centralized and automated key management has several advantages as far as achieving compliance. Whenever several applications are installed on a system, a centralized system, such as the Cryptomathic Key Management System (CKMS), would handle all key management functions for each application automatically. This would be much simpler that systems of the past, where each application would have a separate key management interface. The overhead required to audit these KMS interfaces becomes quite excessive. In addition, these interfaces may be incompatible.
Automating the process can simplify the compliance procedures and processes by reducing the human error factor, since humans are very prone to making mistakes, and don’t always have the best intentions. Automation is also much faster, and eliminates the need for manual key management, which is very time demanding.
The three domains of Compliance
As the White Paper explains, there are three basic compliance domains that have their own individual requirements for achieving compliance:
Physical Security
Physical security involves the protection of physical assets from unauthorized actions by equipping the physical hardware and other materials with security devices, which can be grouped into the following three types: