Prepare your organization for Q-Day: 4 steps toward crypto-agility

Q-Day is a looming, unspecified date when quantum computers become powerful enough to break current public-key encryption. The impact is going to be massive—with all sensitive data protected by today’s commonly used encryption algorithms exposed, the entire world would experience a massive data breach. Although no one knows exactly when Q-Day is going to arrive, governments are urging organizations to build quantum resilience.

NIST is deprecating the first set of quantum-vulnerable algorithms by 2030. While that might seem far away, the transition to post-quantum cryptography is a major, multi-year transformation that your organization must begin as soon as possible.

The threat of quantum computing is not confined to this indeterminate Q-Day. Harvest now, decrypt later attacks put your currently encrypted data in immediate danger, as bad actors collect your sensitive data to expose when quantum computing is readily accessible.

With Q-Day approaching, your organization should strive to achieve crypto-agility through a cryptographic infrastructure that is proactive, flexible, powerful and fast.

Crypto-agility is the ability to rapidly adapt cryptographic mechanisms in response to threats, technological advances or vulnerabilities—without disrupting infrastructure or business processes. The benefit of crypto-agility is its inclusiveness; by adopting a more flexible, centralized cryptographic infrastructure, your organization can address existing challenges while preparing for the quantum threat.

Cryptography is everywhere, and it’s challenging to update. Many systems require long update cycles and must comply with extensive data security regulations. Organizations hesitate to update cryptography for fear of breaking mission-critical processes or disrupting operations.

Also, maintaining many disparate tools for different pieces of cryptography across the environment adds to the monumental workload. With crypto-agility, organizations can get greater control over the configuration and deployment of cryptography by abstracting and simplifying the way they interact with it.

Instead of manually updating systems through several different tools, crypto-agility simplifies the process and empowers teams to make updates once and push changes throughout the environment.

IBM’s technology-driven approach guides clients on their journey toward achieving crypto-agility:

1.    Discover and inventory. Automatically and continuously discover and inventory your cryptographic landscape. Identify cryptographic objects and IT assets, detect unknown or shadow cryptography, and map dependencies, ownership and usage.

2.    Assess and comply. Assess your cryptographic posture to prioritize vulnerabilities and maintain compliance. Assess post-quantum cryptography risk, flag outdated or vulnerable algorithms, and generate audit-ready reports to guide faster compliance.

3.    Manage lifecycle. Simplify and automate cryptographic object management. Centralize lifecycle operations in one tool, automate key generation and certificate renewal, and enforce consistent policies across the organization.

4.    Protect and adapt. Encrypt data and adopt a crypto-agile architecture. Use agentless transparent database encryption, assess the efficiency and feasibility of post-quantum cryptography (PQC) algorithms, and protect against harvest now, decrypt later attacks with Adaptive Proxy.

IBM® Guardium® strives to help your organization protect its sensitive data, mitigate risk and prepare for quantum resilience through crypto-agility. By leveraging our leadership in post-quantum cryptography and our deep expertise in data security, IBM Guardium offers a comprehensive, unified, AI-powered cryptography experience to help your organization protect today and prepare for tomorrow.

Adopt crypto-agility and transform your cryptographic infrastructure