How cloud providers and enterprise infrastructure teams can build multi-tenant key management services backed by physical post-quantum TPMs.
Software-only key management vaults (storing keys in encrypted cloud databases) remain vulnerable to hypervisor vulnerabilities, rogue administrators, and host OS memory dumps. Anchoring the root key of a vault inside physical TPM silicon ensures that keys cannot be extracted even if the host operating system is fully compromised.
We examine hardware-assisted virtualization architectures where a physical post-quantum TPM multiplexes virtual TPM (vTPM) instances to hundreds of guest virtual machines, each with isolated NVRAM partitions and cryptographic namespaces.
Designing secure key backup and recovery architectures: using threshold secret sharing (Shamir's Secret Sharing) to split master vault keys across multiple air-gapped TPMs located in geographically distinct datacenters.