Overview

Many technologies need to protect applications in production, leveraging encryption technologies; however, security threats can also surface during the development, pre-production phases. Additionally, during deployment and production, insiders who manage the infrastructure that hosts critical applications, may pose a threat given their super-user credentials and level of access to secrets or encryption keys.

Organizations need to incorporate secure design practices in their development operations and embrace DevSecOps to ensure the protection of their applications from the vulnerabilities and threat vectors that can compromise their data and potentially threaten their business.

IBM® Hyper Protect Virtual Servers protects Linux workloads on IBM Z and LinuxONE throughout their lifecycle build management and deployment. This solution delivers the security needed to protect mission critical applications in hybrid multi-cloud deployments.

IBM Hyper Protect Virtual Servers enables:

• Developers to securely build their applications in a trusted environment with integrity.
• IT infrastructure providers to manage the servers and virtualized environment where the applications are deployed without having access to those applications or their sensitive data
• Application users to validate that those securely built applications originate from a trusted source by integrating this validation into their own auditing processes.
• Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) to be confident that their data is both protected and private from internal and external threats.

IBM Hyper Protect Virtual Servers solutions delivers security measures to address threat vectors that appear at different phases of an application’s lifecycle: build, deployment, and management. It is designed to uniquely protect such workloads that are deployed on IBM Z and LinuxONE servers in hybrid, multi-cloud environments.

IBM Security Threat Management solutions help you thrive in the face of cyber uncertainty. As part of IBM's best practices towards securing keys and key management, IBM Hyper Protect Virtual Servers images are signed with keys that are embedded into the product, enabling image validation during the deployment process.

Important: The signing keys are periodically refreshed and the updated keys will be made available with adequate notice before the expiration of the existing signing keys. To stay protected against internal and external threats, upgrade the IBM Hyper Protect Virtual Servers product regularly.

The signing keys for IBM Hyper Protect Virtual Servers 1.2.7.9 are valid until 31 March 2025. The following table shows the signing key expiry dates of all 1.2.x releases. Note that IBM will discontinue support for the IBM® Hyper Protect Virtual Servers 1.2.x on 31 March, 2025. For more information, see Discontinuance of support.

Table 1. IBM Hyper Protect Virtual Servers signing key expiry dates