As digital systems proliferate, the need to address evolving threats to critical data becomes increasingly urgent. Implementing a crypto-agile architecture is essential for organizations striving to adapt to ever-changing security challenges and regulatory demands. However, deploying such an architecture across existing environments can be challenging and requires a methodical approach to ensure robust security and compatibility.
In the first edition of this three-part series on crypto-agility, we examined the broader concept of crypto-agility. In the second part, we addressed how security abstraction with centralized policy management and decentralized enforcement enables organizations to deploy a strong and flexible security architecture. In this final installment of our series, we explore how organizations can implement a crypto-agile architecture across existing legacy applications, which may have static or perhaps even no data protection functionality, to enhance security today and future-proof against tomorrow’s evolving threats.
Why Agility Matters
Evolving threats, new attack vectors, and advancements in computational capability continue to expose vulnerabilities in today’s systems. Agility has become important to organizations because cryptography underpins the security of critical business data – at rest, in transit, and in use. Deploying an agile architecture enables organizations to navigate these challenges and effectively address:
- Obsolete algorithms that must be replaced to avoid vulnerabilities.
- Operational demands that require the protection of new datasets, records, or fields.
- Changes in industry standards, such as PCI-DSS, or new regulatory pressures demanding compliance with the latest standards.
Data Protection Agility equips organizations with tools to address these challenges while minimizing the expense and disruption related to evolving or, in some cases, overhauling data security.
Challenges
Before diving into deployment strategies, it is important to first recognize challenges associated with implementing crypto-agility in existing applications and environments. Typical issues that need to be addressed involve:
- Legacy dependencies
- Infrastructure diversity
- Jurisdictional adaptability
Legacy dependencies often arise from systems built on outdated technologies that may depend on obsolete algorithms that cannot be quickly replaced or updated without significant disruption to operations. For example, a banking application written in COBOL built in a 32-bit operating environment might not incorporate sensitive data protection or may leverage legacy crypto-libraries interwoven into the fabric of the application to protect sensitive data. Diverse infrastructures, including legacy on-premises environments operating alongside cloud-based deployments in hybrid configurations, demand varying degrees of security capabilities. Add to this equation varying jurisdictional requirements on how and where data can be processed and stored or revealed, and the complexity associated with deploying a crypto-agile architecture becomes clear.
Best Practices
The design of a crypto-agile architecture involves adhering to core principles. When deploying a crypto-agile architecture across the enterprise, organizations should follow these best practices:
- Security abstraction: Decoupling data protection functionality from applications ensures seamless updates to algorithms and data protection techniques without having to rearchitect systems. Hardcoding algorithms should be avoided; instead, applications should allow for easy upgrades to stronger, more efficient cryptographic methods. Instead of interweaving data protection functionality, which often involves integrating a crypto-library, abstracted security can be provided as a policy-driven service to applications.
- Centralized policy management: By centralizing control over data protection policies, enterprises can simplify the development and upkeep of data security. Centralized policies are able to enforce uniform security across various applications, platforms, and datasets. This ensures compatibility, mitigates risks from operational silos, and facilitates rapid threat responses, as centralized policies can be updated more quickly than a fractured ad-hoc approach to data protection, which is deeply prone to inconsistencies.
- Decentralized enforcement: Though central policy control is important, security enforcement must be able to proliferate across the enterprise in order to maximize scalability. Enterprises cannot afford to have performance choke points that throttle overall performance. Tailored updates at the endpoint level, combined with granular access controls and monitoring, reduce insider threats, and enhance the overall security posture.
A truly crypto-agile architecture enables organizations to secure sensitive data, adapt to a changing threat landscape, and remain compliant with regulatory requirements while maximizing performance and minimizing the cost and complexity of meeting these demands.
Deployment Roadmap
To deploy a crypto-agile architecture effectively, organizations must contemplate how both current and future security, business, and regulatory needs might require changes on how data is handled and who and what may have access during use, transit, and storage. Critical steps required to develop and execute this strategy include:
1. Assess the existing environment:
- Identify all data security mechanisms, including encryption, tokenization, hashing, redaction, digital signing, static or dynamic masking, and key management.
- Document the algorithms, key lengths, and protocols in use.
- Evaluate dependencies on specific libraries or hardware.
2. Abstract cryptographic operations:
- Implement an abstraction layer, accessible via, APIs or standard program interfaces, for example, to avoid interweaving cryptographic details within application code.
- Look for abstraction layers that incorporate not only a broad set of security functionalities, but also those that can simplify integration into third-party hardware security, if needed.
3. Adopt centralized key management
- Keys underpin the security of cryptographic systems; integrated key management minimizes misconfigurations and ensures uniform implementation across the organization.
- Leverage automated key management for consistent robust key generation, storage, rotation, and complete lifecycle maintenance, including the ability to suspend (temporarily or permanently) cryptographic keys.
- Generate unique keys for specific operations, applications, or datasets, as may be appropriate to minimize the impact of potential compromised keys, and regularly audit and revoke outdated keys.
4. Enable algorithm flexibility:
- Leverage security solutions that enable changes to algorithms without having to rearchitect the application code base.
- Support multiple cryptographic algorithms, protocols, and security techniques, such as redaction, random-number generation, or encryption with varying degrees of key lengths and strength to fulfill different applications and security, performance, and transitional requirements.
5. Addressing interoperability:
- Ensure backward compatibility during transitions, supporting both legacy and modern algorithms, including where appropriate new quantum-resistant ciphers following the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) guidance or other updated industry standards.
- Monitor advancements in quantum-resistant algorithms and experiment with hybrid models that combine classical and quantum-resistant ciphers.
- Plan phased migrations to post-quantum solutions, starting with high-risk assets such as “long-lived” data. Adopting a hybrid model allows organizations to gradually migrate to quantum-resistant algorithms while maintaining compatibility with existing systems.
The Unique Challenge of Securing Data in Legacy Applications
The concept of implementing data protection functionality into legacy applications can be incredibly daunting, as traditional approaches tend to rely on interweaving cryptographic libraries and general data protection functionality into applications. This approach adds tremendous amounts of cost and complexity to legacy applications that were often architected with little regard to data security. Implementing solutions for protecting data in legacy applications have also traditionally required developers that were familiar with (or even experts in) cryptography and key management. Because of these challenges, many enterprises have simply opted to ignore application-level data security and implement data protection solely in storage environments. However, evolutions in industry standards, such as PCI-DSS, are beginning to require that data itself is secured, often before it reaches and independent of its storage location. This points to application-level data protection.
The good news is that the very same approaches for maximizing crypto-agility also tend to drastically simplify securing data in applications. Instead of interweaving cryptography, applications can simply present a piece of data to a security service for transformation into its secure state. Optimally, these security services (or security services platforms) include a broad spectrum of security techniques that can leverage centralized policies to secure and reveal data at the right time for the right users to meet business objectives. When policies are updated, the application may be able to take advantage of security updates without every changing the way it requests security. Platforms that support a multitude of interfaces, such as native APIs, command lines, batch scripts, or RESTful APIs, allow for data protection to be implemented, instead of months of architectural work, in as little as a single line of code.
The Way Forward
In an era of rapid technological evolution, deploying a crypto-agile architecture has become essential for addressing today’s cybersecurity challenges while preparing for the future. Deploying a crypto-agile architecture across legacy systems can be challenging and requires detailed planning and design. By carefully abstracting security functionality, adopting centralized policy management, and enforcing a decentralized execution model, organizations can create a resilient and adaptable security foundation that goes beyond simple PQ readiness. Organizations that prioritize crypto-agility today will be better positioned to meet the demands of tomorrow. By ensuring algorithm flexibility, organizations can enhance security, reduce operational risk, and remain compliant with evolving standards.
When evaluating application-level data protection solutions of this nature, look for solution providers that include a broad range of data protection functionality that can adapt to the current and future needs of your enterprise. Look also for those that implement all their security functionality in a single code base, instead of separate system patched together. Identify solutions that can span across multiple environments, including a broad range of operating systems deployed on-premises, in the cloud, and in hybrid deployment environments, instead of those that only support specific deployment models, such as cloud-only, or SAAS only deployments, to ensure that all of your applications can address the need for crypto-agile, modern data protection and privacy. And, above all else, ask for a proof-of-concept (POC). This is where enterprises should be able to easily segregate the solutions that can actually simplify crypto-agile data protection from those who just have good marketing departments. The proof is in the POC.
Leading with Prime Factors
Prime Factors has been a leader in data protection for nearly half a century, delivering comprehensive, data-centric cryptographic solutions that empower organizations to secure critical data across applications and environments. Designed with flexibility and crypto-agility in mind, Prime Factors’ EncryptRIGHT abstracts security functions from applications and enables centralized policy management and decentralized enforcement. The innovative model allows organizations to quickly adapt to evolving threats, operational requirements, and changing regulations without disrupting business operations.
To learn more about application-level data protection, the unique features offered by Prime Factors’ EncryptRIGHT, and how it can help your organization in your crypto-agility journey, check out primefactors.com/data-protection/application-level-data-encryption. To experience the features and benefits of EncryptRIGHT firsthand, request your free trial.
To learn more about crypto-agility, read the other two parts of our Prime Factors Crypto-Agility Series:
