Introduction and concept of se.SAM™ PKI

Beginning with se.SAM™ N-Series version 5.0 – planned for summer 2022 – sematicon AG will offer a HSM based PKI solution for IT and industrial use. The Certificate Authority (CA) will be available as an integrated software module on se.SAM™ N200 Crypto Appliance and se.SAM™ NX200 24-48V Industrial DIN_rail fan-less appliance.

Positioning of se.SAM™ PKI

Following the N200 core concepts all CA and sub-CA keys are crypto keys held in hardware. These CA keys are managed in the intuitive N200 admin GUI and synchronized within HSM clusters. CA keys are included in automatic backups and no limitation on numbers of keys, crypto operations, or accessing clients apply.

	Typical CA installations	se.SAM™ PKI
Distribution	Software only	Plug & play hardened appliance
Update	Manual update process of OS and application required	One-step appliance firmware update process with fallback option
Keys	Software only	Plug & play hardened appliance
Scope	CA server limited to 1 CA most common 1 Root-CA or 1 Issue-CA	N200 appliance supports a nearly unlimited number of Root-CAs and Issue-CAs
Availability	Dependent on a single physical or virtual server	Full-redundant HSM cluster with up to 64 instances
Backup	Implementation dependent	Out-of-the-box backup for keys, templates, issued CAs, and certificates
License	Typical licenses required for server and number of issued certificates	Flat-fee license, se.SAM™ PKI covers unlimited CAs and certificates for company internal and external use
Algorithms	Often still focuses on RSA keys	Wide support of ECC algorithms including SECG, NIST and Brainpool curves, as well as RSA keys
Key Distribution	Varies from vendor, typical manual approval process and handling of file-based certificates	Manual issuing is supported, but focus on REST API for certificate signing requests with automated issuing
Target Market	IT	IT, Industry, IoT and Embedded Systems