Enterprise cryptography faces risks beyond just the advent of quantum computers.
For starters, there is no guarantee that the traditional algorithms have not been broken. Though we believe that it is “unlikely” they can be, the reality is that in a conventional computing world, compute power advances and older cryptographic techniques have been revealed to be insecure.
In addition to the cryptography algorithms themselves, we should remember that cryptography is also implemented in software, which has bugs, in some cases as many as 20 bugs per 1,000 lines of code. This means that even though you may trust the algorithm, you still introduce risk in the way it was coded in software.
Other risks include insider threats, such as who has the keys that were installed in the enterprise.
There is hope that the new NIST standardized Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC) algorithms will remediate all cryptographic deficiencies in the enterprise, but this is a false expectation.
Instead, they give us options, and options are helpful because they allow us to create redundancies. Having additional encryption methods means we might be able to remediate some of the single points of failure.
For example, by using two different algorithms to encrypt your data, you make it harder for a bad actor to get in because they must break two crypto defenses instead of one. And by using multiple algorithms, you would be using multiple software stacks, reducing the risk that both have a software bug that allows easy decryption.
Think of how you store something valuable, like your family photographs. Ideally, you don’t keep them on a single hard drive. Instead, you create a redundant array of independent disks (RAID), which allows you to suffer one or more drive failures without losing the pictures.
The same can be done in encryption, to ensure that we still have data confidentiality and integrity even if a single component of the cryptographic stack fails due to a software bug, a data breach, or even a quantum computer!
Ensure crypto agility
The mathematicians and cryptographers who have worked on these NIST algorithms expect them to last a long time. Thousands of people have already tried to poke holes into them and haven’t yet made any meaningful progress toward defeating them. So, they are “probably” OK for the time being.
But as much as we would like to, we cannot mathematically rule out that they cannot be broken.
This means that for commercial enterprises looking to migrate to new cryptography, they should be braced to change again and again — whether that is in five years, 10 years, or 50 years.
One key step you can take, however, is to ensure you can actively control cryptography.
Up until now most cryptography was mostly implicit and not under direct control of the management. Putting more controls around cryptography would not only safeguard data today, but it would provide the foundation to make the next transition easier.
In the old days, we had RSA, a form of encryption that’s been around for about 40 years. Today, we’re seeing dozens of potential future candidates that are much younger and less proven. We’re betting that these new algorithms will stand the test of time, but we don’t know for sure. Crypto agility means building our networks, systems, and policies in such a way that we can switch from one algorithm to another as needed. It’s about having control and the ability to adapt.
Cryptography is full of single points of failure. Even if your algorithm is bulletproof, you might end up with a faulty implementation. Agility helps us move away from these single points of failure, allowing us to adapt quickly if an algorithm is compromised. It is therefore crucial for CISOs to start thinking about agility and redundancy.