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That’s not necessarily true. You can cluster and replicate HSMs to provide scalability but it is common practice to forbid extraction of private key material. In many cases you can’t change that setting without a complete reset of the device.

Edit: to expand on this a bit. The clustering will involve exchanging key material in encrypted form between each HSM. But that exchange is typically protected and authenticated by keys that are themselves attested as having been created securely in hardware. You can’t just inject your own keys to mitm that connection.




For mailservers though? It this scaleable if you start/stop machines on demand.


It can be scalable if you’re prepared to chuck enough money at it. (Response time latencies are another matter, but that is somewhat less important in email). I have no experience at all of securing production mail servers, so whether they do this or not I don’t know and other replies here suggest they don’t use HSMs at all. If they do use HSMs then it’s not crazy to assume that they can’t easily publish old private keys, but if they don’t use HSMs then that is irrelevant.




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