Safeguarding Sensitive Patient Data: Cloud-Based Cryptographic Key Management

Achieving Local Control of Cryptographic Key Management for Healthcare Insurance in the Cloud

Question

An industry regulatory body requires a healthcare insurance company to fully control cryptographic key management locally to ensure the safeguarding of sensitive patient data.

How can the organization achieve this, given that all their workloads are in the cloud?

Answers

Explanations

Click on the arrows to vote for the correct answer

A. B. C. D.

Correct Answer:C.

AWS CloudHSM allows the administrator to have full and exclusive control over the generation and management of cryptographic keys on actual hardware security modules that are physically stored in AWS data centers.

https://aws.amazon.com/cloudhsm/

Option A is INCORRECT because AWS Key Management Service (KMS) is a fully-managed AWS service.

This makes the service an ineligible option since the prerequisite of the use case is for the company to retain full control and administrator of the keys.

Option B is INCORRECT because AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) is primarily for issuing verified security certificates for SSL/HTTPS on AWS resources such as Elastic Load Balancer or Web Application Firewall (WAF).

Option D is INCORRECT because server-side encryption (SSE) is typically encryption of objects or data within the bucket in Amazon S3

The data is encrypted at the object level as it is saved on AWS storage infrastructure and then decrypted when it is accessed.

The best option for the healthcare insurance company to fully control cryptographic key management locally and safeguard sensitive patient data in the cloud is to use AWS CloudHSM (C).

AWS CloudHSM is a service that allows organizations to generate and manage their own encryption keys for use with AWS services and applications. It provides dedicated hardware security modules (HSMs) that are designed to meet the highest regulatory and compliance requirements for cryptographic key storage and management.

With CloudHSM, the healthcare insurance company can deploy a cluster of HSMs in their own Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and retain full control over their encryption keys. This ensures that the keys never leave the organization's control and can only be accessed by authorized personnel.

Additionally, AWS CloudHSM supports industry standard cryptographic protocols such as Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA), providing a high level of security for patient data.

While AWS Key Management Service (KMS) (A) and Server-Side Encryption (SSE) (D) also offer encryption key management services, they do not provide the level of control and assurance that CloudHSM offers, especially in highly regulated industries like healthcare.

AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) (B) is not directly related to cryptographic key management, but rather it provides a way to manage SSL/TLS certificates for secure communication between clients and servers.