cryptography-as-a-service-pattern

To prevent key leakage, delegate cryptographic operations and key management to an external service. This pattern abstracts sensitive key material from your application, utilizing only key identifiers to perform secure cryptographic actions.

The cryptography as a service pattern is a secure design approach that offloads key management and cryptographic operations to a dedicated, trusted service. It addresses security risks by abstracting sensitive key material from the application.

Use this pattern to instruct a cloud KMS like AWS KMS or Google Cloud KMS to perform encryption, receiving only the ciphertext back. Your system delegates operations via key identifiers, ensuring the application never directly handles the cryptographic keys.

Yes, you can perform encryption, decryption, and signing by delegating to an external service. The system sends key identifiers to the trusted service to execute these cryptographic actions without directly exposing the actual key material.

Delegate cryptographic operations when a web application needs to encrypt user data but wants to avoid direct key management risks. This approach prevents misconfiguration and key leakage by offloading sensitive operations to a trusted external service.

Abstracting key material to an external service introduces a dependency on that external service's availability for cryptographic actions. This delegation approach requires a trusted service connection to perform encryption, decryption, and signing operations successfully.