FIPS 140 validated hardware security modules

Every certificate below covers a hardware security module: a dedicated box or card whose job is to hold keys and refuse to give them back. The list is built by matching module names against the product families that ship as HSMs, so it catches Luna, nShield, payShield, CryptoServer, Atalla and the rest, plus anything NIST’s own description calls a hardware security module.

This is where FIPS 140 levels actually bite. 228 of these certificates are at overall level 3, against 597 at level 3 across the whole 140-2 corpus, and 13 reached level 4. Almost nothing else does. If a procurement document says “level 3 or better” without saying HSM, this list is roughly what it means in practice.

Only 55 are active. That number is low because HSM product lines are long-lived and their certificates are not: a module stays in service for a decade while its validation moves to the historical list underneath it. The gap between what is deployed and what is currently validated is wider here than anywhere else in the corpus.

One thing the vendor column will not tell you. The nShield line runs from nCipher Corporation through Thales to Entrust, and NIST holds those as separate registrations, so the certificates for one product family sit under three different vendors. The same is true of SafeNet and Gemalto. Follow a vendor link and you get that registration, not the corporate family.

For what each overall level actually requires, and why level 4 is nearly empty, see the levels article. For what a certificate does and does not attest about a module that holds one, FIPS 140-3 is not a security guarantee goes through the validated modules that shipped ROCA and EUCLEAK.

Vendors

Certificates (366)