Industry Articles

By Menta

Today’s world is already overly complicated to provide robust product security, with extremely motivated hackers creating novel threats exposing new vulnerabilities every day. But considering tomorrow’s world with the looming threat of quantum computing, expanding AI possibilities and rapidly evolving regional regulations and export control risk with severe financial penalties, this is a daunting challenge. The concept of crypto agility emerged as a convincing solution to this intimidating and unsettling problem, offering organizations a flexible framework to adapt their security protocols in response to these ever-changing threats. Crypto agility protects against threat evolution, enables quantum readiness and support for novel cryptography algorithms, adapts to regional requirements and offers product life extension – especially in critical markets like industrial, space and automotive where product lifespans can exceed 10+ years. 

The good news? The solution to this problem is available today! And many may assume they can simply handle this with software running on their processor. But let’s be crystal clear: processors and software fall woefully short as this solution harbors numerous vulnerabilities and limitations that inevitably compromise security, performance and reliability. Software consistently proves susceptible to timing and cache attacks as well as power and electromagnetic emissions analysis. Furthermore, cryptography keys remain perpetually at risk due to well-documented issues including RAM scraping, swap leaks and cold boot attacks. And regarding performance – the evidence is undeniable – software simply cannot keep pace, particularly in high-performance systems and edge-based devices where efficiency is paramount.