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Frank
on 8 August 2017

Hardware cryptography with Ubuntu Server on IBM Z and LinuxONE


This article orginally appeared on Frank Heimes' blog  

I'm proud to blog about the availability of a new technical paper that describes in detail, and based on many examples, how to use hardware supported cryptography on IBM Z and LinuxONE systems explicitly with Ubuntu Server 16.04 LTS (but applies to other Ubuntu Server for s390x releases, too).

Several people from IBM worked on this (see below) - and I personally had the pleasure to join this crowd as the 'voice' and 'pen' from Canonical/Ubuntu.

The document became much more than just a paper, I think it's a general reference on how to use and exploit hardware-assisted clear key crypto operations on current IBM Z technology (generation EC12/BC12 and higher) using Ubuntu Server with OpenSSH, Apache HTTP server and IBM Java.

The paper is available via IBM Techdocs WP102721 (no sign-on needed):

This is yet another great example that shows the powerful combination of Ubuntu Server running on IBM Z and LinuxONE hardware.

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