Invented by Mohamed Atalla, the Atalla key block is the root of all key blocks. All over the globe, hundreds of millions of financial transactions are secured daily using hardware security modules (HSMs) and the Atalla key block format that follows TR-31 guidelines. Here we will explain a bit about AKB and why a banking-grade key management system (KMS) must support it.

For traditional banks to rise above the competition they face from big tech, neobanks, and fintechs, they need to add new digital skills to their traditional banking capabilities; positioning themselves as agile providers of financial services by providing demand-driven services at the right time and place.

In the 2009 movie Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, food instead of rain begins to fall from the clouds. Today’s hybrid computing environment employs so many applications using cryptography that clouds are saturated with crypto keys, and you don’t want to find that yours are falling from the cloud into the hands of cyber-criminals. In this blog, from our strategic technology partner nCipher, we explore the critical need for key management in the hybrid cloud, particularly among banking and financial applications. 

In this article, we introduce the role that access tokens play in mobile banking applications and provide recommendations on how to secure these access tokens. We will also explain why such security measures are important.

Application hardening usually consists in processing an already developed application, and transforming it so to make it difficult / impossible to reverse engineer and tamper.

In this article, we shall focus on the techniques used for protecting keys and in general, cryptographic secrets in the context of mobile banking & payment applications.

Today, financial institutions are driven by a strategic question: How can they embrace the benefits from the cloud’s flexible and scalable on-demand services, while perpetuating a trustworthy, banking-grade level of cryptographic security? This article looks at some of the trends, challenges and security concerns that financial institutions face when considering whether to migrate their business-critical applications and cryptography to the cloud.

Here we explain why additional security mechanisms, beyond the mobile OS security features, are needed to protect mobile banking applications from malware and related threats.

Application hardening for mobile apps refers to implementing security measures to protect apps against reverse-engineering or tampering. In this article, we look at the importance of application hardening for mobile banking applications and explore some of the techniques that can be used to shield an app against such attacks.