A Hardware Security Anchor (HSA) is a product type characterized by the following two basic IT security functions:

• An HSA is capable of securely storing particularly sensitive data, such as passwords, PINs, cryptographic keys, etc., whereby the protection must include hardware measures. Particularly sensitive data are such data, which can only be stored in plain text and cannot be encrypted for their protection. They often act as so-called "original secrets" at the beginning of a chain of trust. Therefore, they have to be available unencrypted. Such primal secrets are for example cryptographic keys like root certificates, key-encryption keys or master keys. Also passwords, PINs or other data, which are only available in plain text, can belong to such particularly sensitive data.
• Before a user is allowed to perform operations with particularly sensitive data, he or she must successfully authenticate himself or herself to the HSA.
  

An HSA always consists of dedicated hardware including necessary soft- and firmware. In this CI Requirements Profile (CIRP), no restrictions are placed on possible designs of an HSA. These will be diverse depending on uses to be considered in later stages (see chapter 1.2.2).

Note: The HSA to be described according to the document "VS-Produktkatalog des BSI” [2], chap. 5.9.2 is restricted to hardware, i. e. such things as virtual smart cards "derived" from a hardware-based smart card are not subject of this CIRP.
Ultimately, an HSA serves to protect user data with a VS-NfD protection requirement, whereby the user data is processed either by the HSA itself or by an overall product of which the HSA is a component. In the latter case, the HSA may not even be exposed to the VS-NfD classified user data. As an example, the use of an HSA as an authentication token in the context of a two-factor authentication in the case of hard disk encryption can be mentioned: here, the VS-NfD classified user data is processed exclusively on the computer with the hard disk encryption and indirectly protected by the authentication token that can be removed from the computer. In this sense, the need for protection of VS-NfD classified user data can always be assumed and will therefore no longer be explicitly considered in the following. In the following, the data for which the HSA provides direct protection will be considered. This includes particularly sensitive data, such as passwords, PINs, cryptographic keys, etc., as well as security-relevant functional parts of the HSA.

Description of the product type itself, which must be protected to a particular degree with regard to integrity, authenticity and/or confidentiality.
After defining the security problem in chap. 2, chap. 4 defines the security requirements that are suitable for implementing the security objectives formulated in chap. 3 for an HSA and its environment. These are structured according to the following aspects:

• Self-protection of security functions and their data: Req.HardwareSecurity, Req.DataProtection
• Access control, authentication: Req.AccessControl, Req.Authentication, Req..AuthenticationMechanism
• Cryptographic support: Req.Crypto, Req.Random, Req.Certificates, Req.KeyManagement
• In addition, there are also general security management requirements: Req.Residual, Req.SecurityManagement, Req.Selftest, Req.SecurityArchitecture.

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