Cryptomathic Blog

This article addresses some of the challenges of symmetric cryptography as applied in banks, describing how it works and what are its unbeaten advantages as opposed to asymmetric cryptography.

As part of the global drive for digital transformation, legally binding digital signatures are at the forefront of many businesses’ ambitions to provide an enhanced and complete digital customer journey. Even though most people can understand the general concept of digital signatures, reaching the highest level of assurance with a Qualified Electronic Signature contains quite a few things to consider.

Here we provide a high-level comparison between Cryptomathic Signer and other eIDAS remote signing solutions available in the market.

The IBM mainframe series (“z-series”) has become a backbone for security, privacy and resilience in a large share of payment and banking related applications across the globe. This article explains why a cryptographic key management system (KMS) that supports the hybrid-cloud is a prerequisite to effective and compliant security management of these mainframes.

Banks and financial institutions must adhere to a rigorous set of security and regulatory practices to protect data, communications, and processes.

How can keys be securely exchanged over potentially unprotected channels? The answer to this question is “key blocks”. A key block is an essential cryptographic key format that allows users to securely exchange and utilize keys over various environments. 

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.

Thales Key Blocks are an essential cryptographic key wrapping format. In comparison to other key block formats, they are proprietary and only work with Thales payShield HSMs. In what follows, we delve into detail about this key block format.

In a retail financial services environment, the compromise of a symmetric cryptographic key is a critical security breach. Such a situation is described by the ANSI X9.24-1-2017 standard. Here, we summarize the ANSI guidance on how to respond if a potential compromise has been identified.

The PCI Council requires most actors of payment networks to implement ANSI X9.24/TR-31-compliant key blocks to wrap and securely transmit, transfer, or translate key or PIN codes.