Cryptomathic Blog

An over five-year-long process has come to a preliminary end: On July 5, 2022, NIST issued the long-awaited announcement of the winners of Round 3 of the NIST Post-Quantum Crypto (PQC) Standardization Process, that is, which quantum-resistant cryptographic algorithms NIST has selected for standardization.

Last month, one of the three NIST finalists for post-quantum signature schemes has received its final nail in the coffin: Ward Beullens, a PostDoc at IBM Research, published a practical key recovery attack against the Rainbow signature scheme.

Most current public-key cryptography (asymmetric) algorithms are vulnerable to attack from large-scale quantum computers. In its efforts to standardize post-quantum cryptography (PQC), NIST has begun the process of evaluating several PQC candidates in order to standardize one or more public-key algorithms that are quantum-resistant.

Cryptomathic has completed a successful integration of its centralized HSM and cryptography management platform, Crypto Service Gateway (CSG), with the CyberArk Identity Security platform in a live setting at an unnamed tier-one German bank.

This article discusses the misuse of X.509 certificates and keys in the SolarWinds attack and how Cryptomathic CKMS and CSG could help protect against such attacks.

Since the announcement of the SolarWinds supply chain attack, intensive analysis has been done by Crowdstrike, FireEye (with additional details), Microsoft, Symantec, SolarWinds, and many others, to understand the attack’s workings both within SolarWinds and in the targeted networks. Here we focus on the code signing procedures, which seemingly failed at SolarWinds but likely could have mitigated the risk of the attack if they had been implemented and enforced to a higher standard.

Part 2 – Accelerating Time-to-Market

With the increase in e-commerce and electronic communications on the one hand and the growing challenges of cybercrime and data protection regulation, on the other hand, cryptography is becoming an increasingly important business enabler.

The business world today is built on the pervasive use of cryptography, to authenticate people and processes, to secure communications, and to protect sensitive data.

The first practical chosen-prefix collision attack on SHA-1 was announced in January 2020 by researchers Gaëtan Leurent and Thomas Peyrin: “SHA-1 is a Shambles”.