Suppose that you have a very valuable SSL certificate (for example,you are a bank) and a rather complex application (for example, you aredoing online banking). You want to limit the damage of a compromiseas much as possible and especially you do not want to have the highvalue SSL certificate compromised, because that would be a gold mine forsophisticated attackers.

Here is one approach to this problem that has recently struck me:

• your application runs on your pool of servers as usual, but each of

Here is another consequence of the Debian OpenSSL security bug that I did not hearabout (or realize) until recently: it lets an attacker steal any ofyour SSL certificates that were created with the broken (weak) OpenSSLversions. This includes signed certificates, with all that thatentails .

How the attacker does it is simple. They get your actual certificatesimply by connecting to your SSL-protected service (such as yourwebsite); the SSL protocol exchange necessarily sends them a copy ofyour certificate, complete with