Exclusive: CoreWeave launches Remote Key Encryption to keep customer keys off its cloud
Artificial intelligence cloud provider CoreWeave Inc. today unveiled Remote Key Encryption, a service that encrypts customer data sitting on its infrastructure with keys the company itself never holds.
The service takes aim at the key-custody problem that keeps enterprise AI projects parked in security review. Auditors want a named list of everyone able to decrypt sensitive material, and on most clouds the cloud provider is on that list. Model weights and training checkpoints fall under the same rules as any other regulated corporate data, which leaves security teams reconciling an infrastructure choice against obligations written well before the workload existed.
Encryption under the new service runs client-side, inside a customer’s own compute boundary, using keys generated and stored in whatever secrets manager, key management system or hardware security module that customer already operates. No key is imported into a CoreWeave-side key store, so the company holds only ciphertext.
Access to the nodes themselves stays gated behind CoreWeave’s Support Access Management controls. Support engineers at the company cannot reach those nodes without a customer’s express permission, according to the announcement.
Rotation, expiration and revocation run on the customer’s existing schedule and tooling. CoreWeave said the service drives rotation and deletion through that infrastructure rather than standing up a parallel set of controls, and that its approach to key lifecycle management is patent pending. The encryption algorithms underneath are standard ones.
“The fastest path through the loop to production isn’t a new security model,” Andy Manoske, product lead for enterprise and security at CoreWeave, and Paul Friedman, head of security foundations, wrote in a blog post. “It’s making sure our security layer speaks fluently to the one you have already built.”
The same argument drives CoreWeave’s identity work, which landed earlier. CoreWeave IAM handles authentication and authorization across the company’s cloud and federates with enterprise identity providers, Microsoft Corp.’s Entra and Okta Inc. among them, leaving the customer’s own provider as the source of truth. Automated User Provisioning, introduced last November, syncs users and groups continuously, so a hire, a role change or a termination propagates across CoreWeave Kubernetes Service, AI Object Storage and the console without anyone filing a ticket.
Training clusters are a harder case. CoreWeave’s offering for them is SUNK, which packages the open-source job scheduler Slurm for Kubernetes. Slurm keeps a notion of identity all its own, built on POSIX users, groups and accounts, and reconciling those accounts with a corporate directory has traditionally been manual work.
SUNK User Provisioning creates the POSIX user and groups, syncs SSH keys and sets up the Slurm account the moment a federated user turns up in CoreWeave IAM. Add a researcher to a group in Entra or Okta, the company said, and that person can log in to a cluster node inside a minute with the right permissions already set.
Remote Key Encryption enters limited availability later this year, with IBM Corp. as a launch partner. The first release protects data on CoreWeave AI Object Storage using keys held in HashiCorp Vault, HashiCorp Vault Enterprise or any key management or hardware security product supporting the Key Management Interoperability Protocol. IBM acquired HashiCorp Inc. in February 2025.
CoreWeave’s Fully Connected conference takes place in San Francisco from Sept. 30 to Oct. 1. SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, theCUBE, will be on site for reporting and interviews with CoreWeave executives, with coverage available on demand after the event.
Image: CoreWeave
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