Patent ID: 8369521

Claim:
An apparatus, comprising: a smart card reader operable to receive a smart card, the smart card having an X509 certificate; and a smart card based encryption key management system operable to detect an insertion of the smart card into the smart card reader and, responsive to detecting the insertion, initiate a current session and attempt to validate the X509 certificate by verifying that the X509 certificate has not expired, verifying that the X509 certificate was issued by a trusted Certificate Authority (CA), and verifying that the X509 certificate has not been revoked, wherein the smart card based encryption key management service is further operable to, responsive to a successful validation of the X509 certificate, attempt to verify a PIN corresponding to the smart card and, responsive to a successful verification of the PIN, maintain the current session with the smart card, the smart card based encryption key management system comprising: an encryption key creation interface operable to generate an encryption key based on encryption key seed material responsive to an encryption key creation request; an encryption key retrieval interface operable to locate the encryption key seed material and re-generate the encryption key responsive to an encryption key retrieval request; and an encryption key seed material validation mechanism operable to verify that the encryption key seed material has not been modified.