The Payment HSM Interface (PHI) is a high-throughput, low-latency, load-balancer which runs inside the customer’s infrastructure to perform round-robin load balancing across the Payment HSMs in the Utimaco Service.

The Payment HSM service from Utimaco provides a highly resilient fully managed service of Payment HSMs with greater than 99.999% availability.

The PHI will:

• Support the Utimaco Atalla AT1000 and Thales payShield APIs
• Maintain a connection to all HSMs in the Utimaco Payment HSM Service that are in the configured list
• Spread the commands it receives across the available HSM connections
• Handle thousands of open input sockets at any one time
• Stream commands through the open output connection to each HSM
• Forward the response received from the HSM to the correct input socket
• Handle thousands of in-flight packets (due to long command-response latency)
• Handle dropped connections and offline HSMs
• Automatically re-establish connections to HSMs which become available again
• Avoid attempting to send commands to HSMs which are unavailable

The Payment HSM Interface (PHI) is a high-throughput, low-latency, load-balancer which runs inside the customer’s infrastructure.

The PHI is a virtual machine image. Customers can spin-up instances of this within their IBM cloud infrastructure.

The PHI establishes a mutually authenticated TLS tunnel (using ECC and AES256 encryption) terminating inside the HSM
itself.

The PHI can be configured to output logs to the customer’s Syslog server.

The PHI supports the Utimaco AT1000 and Thales payShield API's