alt Hacker NewsA dedicated HSM will give you stronger trust that the private key material can't be extracted, but there's no real way to bind an HSM to a specific client and that's a very easy thing to do in the vTPM case.
A dedicated HSM will give you stronger trust that the private key material can't be extracted, but there's no real way to bind an HSM to a specific client and that's a very easy thing to do in the vTPM case.
How often do we need to bind a specific machine to a specific key in the case of TLS?
In every case of TLS I've seen we are concerned with organizational identity, not machine identity. This effectively extends to client certificates in cases like B2B & vendor integration.
In both scenarios you would definitely want to use an HSM style solution.
Protecting the HSM from inappropriate use (proving you are allowed to sign using the keys within) is a problem orthogonal to protecting the key material. In cloud HSM applications, you often combine the cloud vendors managed identity solution and HSM policies to effectively bind a set of machines to a set of keys.