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Cloud KMS GA, new partners expand encryption options

March 15, 2017
Maya Kaczorowski

Security & Privacy Product Manager

As you heard at Google Cloud Next ‘17, our Cloud Key Management Service (KMS) is now generally available. Cloud KMS makes it even easier for you to encrypt data at scale, manage secrets and protect your data the way you want — both in the cloud and on-premise. Today, we’re also announcing a number of partner options for using Customer-Supplied Encryption Keys.

Cloud KMS is now generally available.

With Cloud KMS, you can manage symmetric encryption keys in a cloud-hosted solution, whether they’re used to protect data stored in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or another environment. You can create, use, rotate and destroy keys via our Cloud KMS API, including as part of a secret management or envelope encryption solution. Further, Cloud KMS is directly integrated with Cloud Identity Access Management and Cloud Audit Logging for greater control over your keys.

As we move out of beta, we’re introducing an availability SLA, so you can count on Cloud KMS for your production workloads. We’ve load tested Cloud KMS extensively, and reduced latency so that Cloud KMS can sit in the serving path of your requests.

Ravelin, a fraud detection provider, has continued their use of Cloud KMS to encrypt secrets stored locally, including configurations and authentication credentials, used for both customer transactions and internal systems and processes. Using Cloud KMS allows Ravelin to easily encrypt these secrets for storage.

Encryption is absolutely critical to any company managing their own systems, transmitting data over a network or storing sensitive data, including sensitive system configurations. Cloud KMS makes it easy to implement best practices for secret management, and its low latency allows us to use it for protecting frequently retrieved secrets. Cloud KMS gives us the cryptographic tools necessary to protect our secrets, and the features to keep encryption practical.

— Leonard Austin, CTO at Ravelin.

Managing your secrets in Google Cloud


We’ve published recommendations on how to manage your secrets in Google Cloud. Most development teams have secrets that they need to manage at build or run time, such as API keys. Instead of storing those secrets in source code, or in metadata, for many cases we suggest you store secrets encrypted at rest in a Google Cloud Storage bucket, and use Cloud KMS to encrypt those secrets at rest.

Customer-Supplied Encryption Key partners


You now have several partner options for using Customer-Supplied Encryption Keys. Customer-Supplied Encryption Keys (or CSEK, available for Google Cloud Storage and Compute Engine) allow you to provide a 256-bit string, such as an AES encryption key, to protect your data at rest. Typically, customers use CSEK when they have stricter regulatory needs, or need to provide their own key material.

To simplify the use of this unique functionality, our partners Gemalto, Ionic, KeyNexus, Thales and Virtru, can generate CSEK keys in the appropriate format. These partners make it easier to generate an encryption key for use with CSEK, and to associate that key to an object in Cloud Storage or a persistent disk, image or instance in Compute Engine. Each partner brings differentiated features and value to the table, which they describe in their own words below.

Gemalto

Gemalto is dedicated to multi-cloud enterprise key management by ensuring customers have the best choices to maintain high assurance key ownership and control as they migrate operations, workloads and data to the cloud. Gemalto KeySecure has supported Client-Side Encryption with Google Cloud Storage for years, and is now extending support for Customer Supplied Encryption Keys (CSEK).

— Todd Moore SVP of Encryption Products at Gemalto

Ionic

We are excited to announce the first of many powerful capabilities leveraging Google's Customer Supplied Encryption Keys (CSEK). Our new Ionic Protect for Cloud Storage solution enables developers to simply and seamlessly use their own encryption keys with the full capabilities of the Ionic platform while natively leveraging Google Cloud Storage.

— Adam Ghetti, Founder and CEO of Ionic

KeyNexus

KeyNexus helps customers supply their own keys to encrypt their most sensitive data across Google Cloud Platform as well as hundreds of other bring-your-own-key (BYOK) use cases spanning SaaS, IaaS, mobile and on-premise, via secure REST APIs. Customers choose KeyNexus as a centralized, platform-agnostic, key management solution which they can deploy in numerous highly available, scalable and low latency cloud or on-premise configurations. Using KeyNexus, customers are able to supply keys to encrypt data server-side using Customer-Supplied Encryption Keys (CSEKs) in Google Cloud Storage and Google Compute Engine.

— Jeff MacMillan, CEO of KeyNexus

Thales

Protected by FIPS 140-2 Level 3 certified hardware, the Thales nShield HSM uses strong methods to generate encryption keys based on its high-entropy random number generator. Following generation, nShield exports customer keys into the cloud for one-time use via Google’s Customer-Supplied Encryption Key functionality. Customers using Thales nShield HSMs and leveraging Google Cloud Platform can manage their encryption keys from their own environments for use in the cloud, giving them greater control over key material.

— Sol Cates, Vice President Technical Strategy at Thales e-Security

Virtru

Virtru offers business privacy, encryption and data protection for Google Cloud. Virtru lets you choose where your keys are hosted and how your content is encrypted. Whether for Google Cloud Storage, Compute Engine or G Suite, you can upload Virtru-generated keys to Google’s CSEK or use Virtru’s client-side encryption to protect content before upload. Keys may be stored on premise or in any public or private cloud.

— John Ackerly, Founder and CEO of Virtru

Encryption by default, and more key management options


Recall that by default, GCP encrypts customer content stored at rest, without any action required from the customer, using one or more encryption mechanisms using keys managed server-side.

Google Cloud provides you with options to choose the approach that best suits your needs. If you prefer to manage your cloud-based keys yourself, select Cloud KMS; and if you’d like to manage keys with a partner or on-premise, select Customer-Supplied Encryption Keys.

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Safe computing!

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