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Security Effects of Administrative Actions

Actions that you take, in the course of administering your SafeNet HSM, can have effects, including destruction, on the roles, the spaces, and the contents of your HSM and its application partition(s). It is important to be aware of such consequences before taking action.

Overt Security Actions

Some actions in the administration of the HSM, or of an application partition, are explicitly intended to adjust specific security aspects of the HSM or partition. Examples are:

•changing a password

•modifying a policy to make a password or other attribute more stringent than the original setting.

Those are discussed in their own sections.

Actions with Security- and Content-affecting Outcomes

Other administrative events have security repercussions as included effects of the primary action, which could have other intent. Some examples are:

•HSM factory reset

•HSM zeroize

•change of a destructive policy

•installation/application of a destructive Capability Update

•HSM initialization

•application partition initialization

This group of administrative actions is compared in this current section Summary of Outcomes of Security-affecting Actions.

Elsewhere

Certain other actions can sometimes cause collateral changes to the HSM, like firmware rollback and update. They usually do not affect contents, unless a partition is full and the action changes the size of partitions or changes the amount of space-per-partition that is taken by overhead/infrastructure, such as when going to HSM firmware 6.22.0 from an earlier version. These are discussed elsewhere.