The cloud services provided by Microsoft Dynamics 365 are gaining rapid market share in the banking world. A burning question for the security departments is how to take advantage of the cloud services on offer without relinquishing control of their cryptographic keys.

Here we look at some of the benefits offered by MS Dynamics cloud services and how an on-premise key management system should integrate with the Azure Key Vault (or other cloud platforms) to retain control of the lifecycle of cryptographic keys and maintain compliance to banking regulations.

Originally published in nCipher website www.ncipher.com 

A few years ago, the BBC reported that the power of the traditional hand-written signature was under threat from its digital counterpart. While it may have taken some time, the increasing adoption of digital services – from banking and financial transactions in the private sector, to taxes and healthcare in the public – has led to a significant rise in the use of electronic signatures.

When migrating their business-critical applications and cryptography to the cloud, banks and financial institutions face a number of concerns. The push to adopt cloud computing for the sake of efficiency and innovation must be balanced with the responsibility to protect sensitive data and processes.

In the mobile environment, while debuggers are legal and legitimate development tools, they can also be used to reverse mobile banking and payment applications. This article describes some of the possible anti-debug techniques.

ATM Remote Key Loading has become a common practice in the industry. Yet managing the top-level keys to establish trust between the Host and the ATM units remains a challenge. This article describes how Cryptomathic CKMS addresses the challenges of key generation and distribution for ATM Remote Key Loading.

While the science and technology behind quantum computers is extremely complex, their computing power has been steadily increasing, from 3 qubits in 1998, to 7 qubits in 2000, to 12 qubits in 2006, and up to 72 qubits in 2018.

The need for social distancing and the fact that most office workers are now exclusively working from home, has led to profound changes in the business world. While the move to digital was already underway in many countries, the recent crisis has provided a new impetus. Many countries already had the underlying regulations and framework for digital identification and signing in place, and they are finding it easier to make the shift. Those that did not, are scrambling to catch up. 

Here we describe some of the HTTPS vulnerabilities in the context of mobile banking and their countermeasures.

In this article we will look at integration points and explain why it is important that a key management system is able to integrate with a number of applications across various environments (in-house data centers and public clouds).