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”.  

This article discusses recent warnings that a chosen-prefix collision attack on SHA-1 is now practical and cost-effective for attackers.

This article discusses how tokenization may reduce false declines with credit card transactions that could negatively impact merchants.

The EMV consortium released several standards detailing how “network” tokenization should be handled. There is now a general consensus within the consortium that tokenization could be the next major task for EMV payments.

Tokenization is a generalized concept of a cryptographic hash. It means representing something by a symbol (‘token’).

EMV is short for EUROPAY-VISA-MASTERCARD. This term is used to refer to standards that have been designed to improve the security of credit and debit card transactions by using chip technology for payment cards.

The concept of a token has been used in the digital world for almost 50 years to separate and protect real data elements from exposure. In recent times, the concept of tokenization has been used as a security mechanism for protecting sensitive data.

With increasingly tough security and privacy regulations, the use of cryptography is exploding in the modern enterprise. Hardware security modules (HSMs) provide the highest standard of security and compliance, but they are difficult to use and often deployed in silos, complicating compliance and hindering crypto-agility. As competitive pressures intensify, how can cryptography be turned into an enabler of business agility and digital transformation?