ELCA: Introducing Enterprise-level Cryptographic Agility for a Post-Quantum Era

Dimitrios Sikeridis; David Ott; Sean Huntley; Shivali Sharma; Vasantha Kumar Dhanasekar; Megha Bansal; Akhilesh Kumar; Anwitha U N; Daniel Beveridge; Sairam Veeraswamy

Paper 2023/1539

ELCA: Introducing Enterprise-level Cryptographic Agility for a Post-Quantum Era

Dimitrios Sikeridis

, VMware xLabs

David Ott, VMware Research

Sean Huntley

, VMware xLabs

Shivali Sharma, VMware xLabs

Vasantha Kumar Dhanasekar, VMware xLabs

Megha Bansal, VMware xLabs

Akhilesh Kumar, VMware xLabs

Anwitha U N, VMware xLabs

Daniel Beveridge, VMware Incubation

Sairam Veeraswamy, VMware xLabs

Abstract

Given the importance of cryptography to modern security and privacy solutions, it is surprising how little attention has been given to the problem of \textit{cryptographic agility}, or frameworks enabling the transition from one cryptographic algorithm or implementation to another. In this paper, we argue that traditional notions of cryptographic agility fail to capture the challenges facing modern enterprises that will soon be forced to implement a disruptive migration from today’s public key algorithms (e.g., RSA, ECDH) to quantum-safe alternatives (e.g., CRYSTALS-KYBER). After discussing the challenge of real-world cryptographic transition at scale, we describe our work on enterprise-level cryptographic agility for secure communications based on orchestrated \textit{cryptographic providers}. Our policy-driven approach, prototyped in service mesh, provides a much-needed re-envisioning for cryptographic agility and highlights what’s missing today to enable disruptive cryptographic change at scale.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Implementation
Publication info: Preprint.
Keywords: Cryptographic Agility Post-Quantum Cryptography PQC Enterprise Crypto Provider
Contact author(s): sikeridisd @ vmware com
dott @ vmware com
shuntley @ vmware com
History: 2023-10-09: approved; 2023-10-07: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2023/1539
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2023/1539,
      author = {Dimitrios Sikeridis and David Ott and Sean Huntley and Shivali Sharma and Vasantha Kumar Dhanasekar and Megha Bansal and Akhilesh Kumar and Anwitha U N and Daniel Beveridge and Sairam Veeraswamy},
      title = {{ELCA}: Introducing Enterprise-level Cryptographic Agility for a Post-Quantum Era},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2023/1539},
      year = {2023},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/1539}
}