Application Partitions
The Luna PCIe HSM has two partition
>one administrative partition, created when you initialize the HSM. The administrative partition is owned by the HSM Security Officer (SO). This partition is used by the HSM SO and the Auditor, and is not used to store cryptographic objects.
>one application partition, created by the HSM SO. The application partition is owned by its Partition Security Officer (PO), and has its own access controls and security policies independent from the administrative partition. Its function is to store cryptographic objects used by your applications.
An application partition is like a safe deposit box that resides within a bank's vault. The HSM (vault) itself offers an extremely high level of security for its contents. An application partition (safe deposit box) on the HSM has its own security and access controls, so that even though the HSM SO has access to the vault, they still cannot access the contents of the individual partitions. Only the Partition Security Officer holds the partition's administrative credentials.
This chapter contains the following procedures for managing application partitions:
