A new whitepaper provides guidance for banks and other financial institutions to help secure their computer systems as new threats emerge, such as those from quantum computing.
The paper by the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center, or FS-ISAC, provides financial firms a framework to improve their “cryptographic agility,” which measures an organization’s ability to adapt cryptographic solutions or algorithms quickly and efficiently in response to new developments and threats. FS-ISAC warns that the move to crypto agility must begin immediately as quantum computing is likely to make a commonly used class of cryptography algorithms insecure in the next few years.
“The financial services sector cannot risk insecure data transmission or storage — it would break the way we conduct business today,” FS-ISAC says in the whitepaper. “And as the number of systems, dependencies between systems and overall technical complexity grow, the effort to update cryptographic assets has intensified.”
The first part of the paper describes what is new and distinctive about crypto agility, according to FS-ISAC. The second part offers more detailed information for technologists and other IT and security specialists at financial institutions. The paper seeks to help stakeholders across organizations “understand the problem space, grasp the necessity of crypto agility, and define an approach that works for their institutions.”
