Cryptography:
A technique of securing information and communications through use of codes so that unintended recipients cannot understand.
Nowadays organizations use cryptography on a daily basis to protect their privacy and keep their conversations and data confidential. Send messages are encrypted using an algorithm with a key only known to the sender and recipient.
As an essential information security tool, cryptography provide many benefits.
- Confidentiality
- Authentication/Digital Signatures
- Data Integrity
- Increased security/privacy
To deliver secure, high-quality code, you need to incorporate security into DevOps. Even large organizations are ransomware attacks these days, so some basic cryptography knowledge at development will only help in future.
Managing encryption and key storage is the main way to ensure cybersecurity. Here are a few cryptography best practices that will protect your data against cyber attacks.
- Protect Your Development Cryptography: Secure your cryptographic assets. Enforce vital certificate security measures in their DevOps environments.
- Use Appropriate Algorithms and Key Sizes: Use symmetric algorithms for protecting data at rest such as databases and asymmetric encryption for protecting data in motion, such as emails or web content. Be sensible with key sizes as large keys often cause issues.
- Regular Key Rotation: Every key should have a crypto period during which a key is functional. Once the crypto period expires, run a rotation to replace the old key with a new one.This will ensure security and less human errors.
- Secure Password Storage: Use the built-in functionality provided by most frameworks/languages to store passwords safely. Store passwords in an irreversible, one-way adaptive function with a strong work factor, and never store them in plain text.
- Never Use the Same Key for Different Purposes: Ensure employees never use same keys for different tasks such as data encryption or authentication. Sticking to single-purpose keys is the safest strategy.
Conclusion: Cryptography Best Practices
With dedicated experts, cryptography is an easy job. But, that doesn’t mean DevOps teams can’t help in protecting data in transit and at rest, both during development and in their final products. If you want to protect your protect your precious data against malicious attacks, best method is to follow these cryptographic best practices.