Is Your Cryptographic Security Setup Holding You Back?

Imagine a scenario where data is kept on hard drives or disks you own, phones can only… well… make phone calls (or send simple text messages), and currency is only of the traditional fiat kind. Welcome to 1999.

Back then, cryptographic keys were secured only by hardware, tokens or smart cards- solutions that for the most part worked well.

20 Years Later: A New Digital Reality

In 2019 interconnectivity and growth of data have exploded and the digital world continues to expand at breakneck speed, with 20 billion networked devices and data anticipated to grow tenfold from 2017 to 2025. 96% of companies now use cloud services and 81% of enterprises operate multi-cloud landscapes. There are over 5 billion mobile phone users, with 2 billion customers preferring mobile banking rather than enter a physical branch.

The currency ecosystem is also unrecognizable from 1998. Daily crypto trades are at $30 billion across over 2000 cryptocurrencies in the market. Total market cap for cryptocurrencies is at around $130 billion as of March 2019, and Tier 1 banks want to get in the game, exploring cryptocurrency services.

Digitization only continues to grow. Organizations rely more on cloud, mobility and IoT infrastructures for their operations, and consequently, more business-critical data is dispersed across those platforms. companies are challenged to find infrastructure to deal with these rapid changes, such as development process, regulation, and new security needs.

New Reality = New Security Challenges

Within this abundance of data and interconnectivity is private information that needs to be protected from undesired access or misuse. The use of cryptography for data encryption and other security functions has a fundamental role in protecting sensitive digital data assets from compromise. Strong protection for cryptographic keys is achieved today in isolated hardware such as hardware security modules (HSMs) which leads to tough compromises in terms of agility, cost and experience. Software solutions such as vaults offer protection at a lower level than hardware, and secrets are exposed at least while in use. Often, sensitive data is left unprotected due to lack of awareness or lack of an easy-to-use solution.

Hard to maintain control:
When your data is in in the cloud or in an endpoint that you do not manage, it is hard to control and protect it; you are essentially dependent on the owner of the device or platform. The control challenge is compounded when considering the breadth of infrastructure in use by the organization — each distinct device platform or cloud provider has their own set of security policies, technologies and limitations.

Inhibited innovation:
Any modification to existing deployed HSMs — to fix vulnerabilities or add new algorithms, for example — is a lengthy and expensive process, in many cases requiring complete hardware replacement.

To Be More Specific…

From mobility to cloud infrastructure to BYOD to crypto asset security, there are many challenges organizations face when designing their cryptography implementations.

What’s a Company to Do?

Rapid innovation in our digital, connected world requires a completely new approach to cryptography that is not only highly secure but also elastic, automated and agile. Today, leading companies are adopting new technology to unbind keys from hardware — enabling digital innovation by making cryptography agile and flexible. These software solutions should provide a high level of trust and allow for secure authentication, encryption, digital signing and more to protect information.

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