NetHSM

This documentation describes the NetHSM software and hardware. The NetHSM software can be either used on the NetHSM hardware, or as a software container (e.g. Docker).

The NetHSM software features a REST API to perform installation, administration and operational tasks. The recommended way to use a NetHSM is through the tool nitropy. Alternatively curl can be used to send HTTP requests to the REST API.

If you obtained a new NetHSM hardware, please refer to the chapter Getting Started first. In case you want to restore a backup of a NetHSM, please refer to the chapter Restore.

Important

If you use a NetHSM instance with a self-signed certificate, for example using the Docker container, you will have to instruct nitropy or curl to ignore the validity of the certificate. For nitropy use the option --no-verify-tls and for curl use the option --insecure/-k to skip the certificate check.

Note

The examples in this documentation use the environment variable NETHSM_HOST, which contains the IP address or URL of the NetHSM. A NetHSM’s default IP address is 192.168.1.1. On a Unix shell the variable can be set with the following command.

$ export NETHSM_HOST="<URL-or-IP-address>"