StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. Utilities
  3. Security
  4. Data Security Services
  5. AWS CloudHSM vs Keywhiz

AWS CloudHSM vs Keywhiz

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

AWS CloudHSM
AWS CloudHSM
Stacks10
Followers56
Votes0
Keywhiz
Keywhiz
Stacks12
Followers50
Votes3
GitHub Stars2.6K
Forks216

AWS CloudHSM vs Keywhiz: What are the differences?

AWS CloudHSM: Dedicated Hardware Security Module (HSM) appliances within the AWS cloud. The AWS CloudHSM service allows you to protect your encryption keys within HSMs designed and validated to government standards for secure key management. You can securely generate, store, and manage the cryptographic keys used for data encryption such that they are accessible only by you. AWS CloudHSM helps you comply with strict key management requirements without sacrificing application performance; Keywhiz: A system for distributing and managing secrets. Keywhiz is a secret management and distribution service that is now available for everyone. Keywhiz helps us with infrastructure secrets, including TLS certificates and keys, GPG keyrings, symmetric keys, database credentials, API tokens, and SSH keys for external services — and even some non-secrets like TLS trust stores. Automation with Keywhiz allows us to seamlessly distribute and generate the necessary secrets for our services, which provides a consistent and secure environment, and ultimately helps us ship faster.

AWS CloudHSM and Keywhiz are primarily classified as "Data Security Services" and "Secrets Management" tools respectively.

Some of the features offered by AWS CloudHSM are:

  • Protect and store your cryptographic keys with industry standard, tamper-resistant HSM appliances. No one but you has access to your keys (including Amazon administrators who manage and maintain the appliance).
  • Use your most sensitive and regulated data on Amazon EC2 without giving applications direct access to your data's encryption keys.
  • Store and access data reliably from your applications that demand highly available and durable key storage and cryptographic operations.

On the other hand, Keywhiz provides the following key features:

  • Keywhiz Server provides JSON APIs for accessing and managing secrets. It is written in Java and based on Dropwizard.
  • KeywhizFs is a FUSE-based file system, providing secrets as if they are files in a directory. Transparently, secrets are retrieved from a Keywhiz Server using mTLS with a client certificate.
  • Presenting secrets as files makes Keywhiz compatible with nearly all software. Outside of Keywhiz administration, consumers of secrets only have to know how to read a file.

Keywhiz is an open source tool with 2.09K GitHub stars and 166 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Keywhiz's open source repository on GitHub.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Detailed Comparison

AWS CloudHSM
AWS CloudHSM
Keywhiz
Keywhiz

The AWS CloudHSM service allows you to protect your encryption keys within HSMs designed and validated to government standards for secure key management. You can securely generate, store, and manage the cryptographic keys used for data encryption such that they are accessible only by you. AWS CloudHSM helps you comply with strict key management requirements without sacrificing application performance.

Keywhiz is a secret management and distribution service that is now available for everyone. Keywhiz helps us with infrastructure secrets, including TLS certificates and keys, GPG keyrings, symmetric keys, database credentials, API tokens, and SSH keys for external services — and even some non-secrets like TLS trust stores. Automation with Keywhiz allows us to seamlessly distribute and generate the necessary secrets for our services, which provides a consistent and secure environment, and ultimately helps us ship faster.

Protect and store your cryptographic keys with industry standard, tamper-resistant HSM appliances. No one but you has access to your keys (including Amazon administrators who manage and maintain the appliance).;Use your most sensitive and regulated data on Amazon EC2 without giving applications direct access to your data's encryption keys.;Store and access data reliably from your applications that demand highly available and durable key storage and cryptographic operations.;Use AWS CloudHSM in conjunction with your compatible on-premise HSMs to replicate keys among on-premise HSMs and CloudHSMs. This increases key durability and makes it easy to migrate cryptographic applications from your datacenter to AWS.
Keywhiz Server provides JSON APIs for accessing and managing secrets. It is written in Java and based on Dropwizard.;KeywhizFs is a FUSE-based file system, providing secrets as if they are files in a directory. Transparently, secrets are retrieved from a Keywhiz Server using mTLS with a client certificate.;Presenting secrets as files makes Keywhiz compatible with nearly all software. Outside of Keywhiz administration, consumers of secrets only have to know how to read a file.;KeywhizFs stores all secrets in memory only and never persisted to disk. If KeywhizFs is unmounted or the server loses power, all secrets will be safely removed from that server.;To mitigate a Keywhiz Server outage, KeywhizFs maintains a local cache of previously accessed secrets. Unless the server is rebooted or KeywhizFs unmounted, applications can happily continue accessing secrets previously accessed.;Keywhiz CLI is a Java program for Keywhiz administration. Clients, secrets, and groups can be queried, added, removed, or associated with each other. Users can authenticate and use the CLI.;Keywhiz UI is web app for Keywhiz administration, similiar to Keywhiz CLI. The UI is built with AngularJS. Users can authenticate and use the UI.;Keywhiz makes heavy use of mTLS and X509 certificates. It can even help distribute and rotate them for other services! There is the assumption of a PKI system though. If one does not exist or a PKI is wanted for development consider certstrap for a simple, initial PKI.
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
2.6K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
216
Stacks
10
Stacks
12
Followers
56
Followers
50
Votes
0
Votes
3
Pros & Cons
No community feedback yet
Pros
  • 3
    Fuse FS

What are some alternatives to AWS CloudHSM, Keywhiz?

Vault

Vault

Vault is a tool for securely accessing secrets. A secret is anything that you want to tightly control access to, such as API keys, passwords, certificates, and more. Vault provides a unified interface to any secret, while providing tight access control and recording a detailed audit log.

AWS Key Management Service

AWS Key Management Service

AWS Key Management Service (KMS) is a managed service that makes it easy for you to create and control the encryption keys used to encrypt your data, and uses Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) to protect the security of your keys. AWS Key Management Service is integrated with other AWS services including Amazon EBS, Amazon S3, and Amazon Redshift. AWS Key Management Service is also integrated with AWS CloudTrail to provide you with logs of all key usage to help meet your regulatory and compliance needs.

Doppler

Doppler

Doppler’s developer-first security platform empowers teams to seamlessly manage, orchestrate, and govern secrets at scale.

IBM SKLM

IBM SKLM

It centralizes, simplifies and automates the encryption key management process to help minimize risk and reduce operational costs of encryption key management. It offers secure, robust key storage, key serving and key lifecycle management for IBM and non-IBM storage solutions using the OASIS Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP).

Docker Secrets

Docker Secrets

A container native solution that strengthens the Trusted Delivery component of container security by integrating secret distribution directly into the container platform.

AWS Secrets Manager

AWS Secrets Manager

AWS Secrets Manager helps you protect secrets needed to access your applications, services, and IT resources. The service enables you to easily rotate, manage, and retrieve database credentials, API keys, and other secrets throughout their lifecycle.

EnvKey

EnvKey

Securely store config and manage access in an end-to-end encrypted, auto-syncing desktop app. Connect your apps in minutes in any language with an environment variable and a line or two of code.

Knox-app

Knox-app

Knox is a SaaS (Secrets as a Service) that helps you manage your keys, secrets, and configurations. Start in minutes and close the widest security breach. You cannot keep storing secrets in your git repo or sharing them by email or slack me

Securden Password Manager for Enterprises

Securden Password Manager for Enterprises

Securden Password Vault for Enterprises is a password manager that helps centralize, protect, and streamline all your passwords, keys, DevOps secrets, and other critical credentials for your enterprise or business teams . It is available in both SaaS and on-premise models.

LocalKeys

LocalKeys

LocalKeys is a local-first secret manager for developers. It replaces vulnerable .env files with an AES-256-GCM encrypted vault that works completely offline and requires explicit approval before any process can access your secrets.

Related Comparisons

GitHub
Bitbucket

Bitbucket vs GitHub vs GitLab

GitHub
Bitbucket

AWS CodeCommit vs Bitbucket vs GitHub

Kubernetes
Rancher

Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes vs Rancher

Postman
Swagger UI

Postman vs Swagger UI

gulp
Grunt

Grunt vs Webpack vs gulp