What Can We Expect in 2022: 7 Trends in Cryptography

The top-selling gifts. The top movies at the box office. Everyone loves to see what’s trending. While cryptographic processing does not grab headlines like gifts and movies, it is essential and critical in every industry — banking, retail, manufacturing, and automotive — to protect and secure data. Step aside gadgets and action movies, it’s cryptography’s turn to get time in the limelight!

With a presence in many of the largest banks, retailers, IoT device manufacturers, and corporations, Futurex, with its team of experts, has a unique perspective on the latest cryptography developments. Ryan Smith, vice president, global business development at Futurex, offers up what’s trending in cryptography:

1. Key management. Managing keys is a hot issue, especially when dealing with access rights to the data, legal ramifications of outsourcing and how risks are mitigated. In a recent The Green Sheet article in which Smith was interviewed, he states there’s a need for broader, more robust key management in today’s integrated and increasingly interoperable landscape, in which more parties are sharing data.
2. Cloud-based data security hardware security modules (HSMs). Enterprises and financial services organizations are increasing their adoption of cloud-based data security infrastructure. With new developments in cloud adoption, regulatory compliance, and greater data residency capabilities — and HSMs in the cloud, the infrastructure is in place.
3. HSM flexibility. Organizations have different options with HSMs: on-premises, cloud, and hybrid. It is vital that encryption keys are secured in a private environment.
4. Encrypted key loading. With the growth of mobile-based terminals, encrypted remote key loading has become a necessity, ensuring that the utmost security and compliance requirements are met to remotely inject encryption keys anytime wherever they are deployed.
5. Contactless payments with CPoC. Contactless payments eliminate the need for card reading hardware and provide a high level of security, extending the point of sale beyond the checkout counter. CPoC-based applications, with their transaction processing functionality and high level of security, make them advantageous for all merchants who need payment agility and scalability.
6. Data encryption delivered via a service-oriented architecture. Organizations have ever-increasing volumes of applications and services that require strong cryptography with HSM-backed data encryption and key management. Organizations are looking at other options and looking to experts.
7. Tokenization replaces actual data with a token that is worthless to hackers. This is being implemented cross-industry — spurred out of the need for PCI DSS compliance and organizations’ desire to reduce their compliance scope.