1. Cryptography As A Service
Barclays Crypto Application Gateway and Beyond
23rd May 2013
George French – Barclays
Dan Cvrcek – Smart Architects
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2. Cryptography As A Service
Key Management
Applications
Application
Cryptography
Interface
Audit Logging
Authentication
BCAG /
CSG Service
Vendor
HSM
interfaces
Application Key
Management
Cryptography
Policy
Enforcement
Why Do Banks Use Cryptography
- Traditionally as a control to mitigate risk
Legal
Regulatory
Scheme
Governance
Reputation
Interoperability
- Recently
Business Enabler for new tech
The real value is to reduce the burden on existing systems to “enable more to be done”
HSMs
Operations
and Audit
2 | Cryptography as a Service 23rd May 2013
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3. Beginning … Cryptography and Business
Requirement
Solution lead time
Encrypt data (... and decrypt possibly)
day
Secure key generation and management, recovery
months
Decryption after 30 years, huge data collections (tera bytes), multiple application support, integration
> year
Support and recovery after incidents
Multiply by 2+
As surprising as it may sound there are very few security products that
would actually work and could be managed with a small operational
team. The main culprits:
- integration, scalability, reliability, support
3 | Cryptography as a Service 23rd May 2013
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4. Crypto Service Must Provide For …
Audit
Cryptography is deployed as a control to mitigate a risk it is therefore necessary to be able to demonstrate that the control is effective.
Cryptographic Management
The problem with cryptography is the decryption process.
NEVER GIVE DEVELOPERS OPTIONS WHEN ENCRYPTING DATA
Centralised Management
Small teams even in multinational companies
Monitoring of usage / capacity
BAU operational tasks
Security audits
Information for business units
4 | Cryptography as a Service 23rd May 2013
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5. Problem Space for The Use of Cryptography
What we are trying to manage
Business
Capturing Business Requirements
Provision of a defined operational model
Project/Bespoke development
Testing
Why Do Banks Use Cryptography
- Traditionally as a control to mitigate risk
Legal
Regulatory
Scheme
Governance
Reputation
Interoperability
- Recently
Business Enabler for new tech
The real value is to reduce the burden on existing systems to “enable more to be done”
5 | Cryptography as a Service 23rd May 2013
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6. Problem Space for The Use of Cryptography
What we are trying to manage
Business
Capturing Business Requirements
Provision of a defined service
Risk Mitigation
Bullet
Build
Requires Specialised knowledge
Meet requirements
Internal governance and standards compliance
Infrastructure build
Change management
“The usual suspects”
Securely building data structures
Data migration
Secure clustering
Access control
Applications
Use of vendor APIs
Lack of understanding in the use of cryptography
Problem with support for key rollover and data migration.
Implementation issues
Threading
API credentials
Hardware
Vendor lock-in
Bespoke development of processes and procedures that are specific to the vendors products.
Under utilisation of hardware
Due to the HA requirements of standard patterns and the requirement for application segregation based on the current deployed HSM products.
Cost
6 | Cryptography as a Service 23rd May 2013
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7. Problem Space for The Use of Cryptography
What we are trying to manage
Business
Capturing Business Requirements.
Provision of a defined service.
Risk Mitigation
Bullet
Requires Specialised knowledge
Meet requirements
Internal governance and standards compliance
Infrastructure build
Change management
Build
Hardware Utilisation
Project model delivers variances
Patch and Security Vulnerability Management
Operation impact of outages
“Non-functional” Requirements
Operation
Management and support issues of device
Location of HSMs
HSMs are located in the Data Centres, access is restricted
Manual intervention required
Change configurations
Key change (LMK)
Collection of Diagnostic Information
7 | Cryptography as a Service 23rd May 2013
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8. Problem Space for The Use of Cryptography
What we are trying to manage
Business
Capturing Business Requirements.
Provision of a defined service.
Risk Mitigation
Bullet
Build
Requires Specialised knowledge
“The usual suspects”
Internal governance and standards compliance
Operation
Hardware Utilisation
Project model delivers variances
Patch and Security Vulnerability Management
Operation impact of outages
Compliance
Regulatory and scheme compliance
Internal Audit
Customer Due diligence
8 | Cryptography as a Service 23rd May 2013
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9. Problem Space for The Use of Cryptography
What we are trying to manage
Business
Capturing Business Requirements.
Provision of a defined service.
Risk Mitigation
Bullet
Build
Requires Specialised knowledge
“The usual suspects”
Internal governance and standards compliance
Operation
Hardware Utilisation
Project model delivers variances
Patch and Security Vulnerability Management
Operation impact of outages
Compliance
Regulatory and scheme compliance
Internal Audit
Customer Due diligence
... I know nothing short of impossible but here we go
9 | Cryptography as a Service 23rd May 2013
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10. BCAG Cryptographic Approach
Separating use from management and configuration
Use (business units):
Request system authentication credentials (e.g., password);
Do Crypto – e.g., Api.Encrypt(“CC_Number”, “ME”, “Main_DB”, <transaction>)
Management (BU and Crypto Operations):
Policy – what business functions (e.g., encrypt credit card number), how many parties (DB, web app, middleware, …).
Technical (Crypto Operations):
how many keys, algorithms, crypto modes, key lengths, key validity, and so on.
It is possible to provide cryptographic solutions by providing two of the points e.g. API and a cryptographic provider or Crypto provider and Key management
The first implementations of hardware based cryptography required bespoke vendor APIs to support applications.
The next stage was the addition of simple Key Management functionality which again was vendor specific. This is the situation that we find ourselves in today with three separate Key Management systems that do not interoperate without manual key management operations taking place.
It is worth noting that a number of standards (de facto and Standards Bodies) have been developed, but they deal with specific instances of cryptography, business sectors or products e.g.
PKCS#1 – 16 Various uses of RSA based Asymmetric based cryptography from RSA Labs
X Exchange and use of Asymmetric keys from ANSI
MSCAPI Cryptographic support for Microsoft applications from Microsoft
BSAFE Cryptographic toolkits provider from RSA
Control Vectors Key Management from IBM
LMK Variants Key Management from Thales
ACL Key Management from nCipher
GSS-API API Framework from IETF
X9.24 pt1/2 Key Management (Banking) from ANSI
With any of the APIs described above there is the problem of vendor implementation and vendor lock-in, coupled with the reluctance of vendors to build solutions that support high levels of integration between other vendor’s products and services. This gives raise to the following issues:
If we standardise on specific vendor then either the bespoke APIs or Key management implementations of the vendor will need to be integrated into applications.
Change of vendor would require a change to applications.
Reliant on sole provider
It is possible for applications to adopt certain standards (e.g. PKCS#11); to try and de-couple vendor specific Application API implementations. In the case of PKCS#11 this would decouple the application API but there would still be a reliance on the vendor’s implementation and key management solution. Also the wholesale adoption general encryption APIs such as PKCS#11 do not allow for the deployment of business specific cryptographic mechanisms i.e. for the banking sector PIN block translation, CVV generation etc.
In order to be vendor agnostic, a different approach to the provision of cryptography is required. To address this the HSM Farm was developed.
10 | Cryptography as a Service 23rd May 2013
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11. BCAG Business Approach
Pay for what you use
Centralised use of resources (people, hardware, network, …)
HSMs used “per operation”, not “per project”.
Commissioning of cryptographic system components by Crypto Operations
skills;
volume; and
single place for deployment and management -> strategy.
Decoupling components (i.e., HSM) from applications
Eliminate vendor lock-in; and
Introduce service-based architecture with replaceable products.
11 | Cryptography as a Service 23rd May 2013
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12. What Does It Look Like – Architectural Blocks
Business
Crypto support
(1st line)
Solution support
(2nd line)
Product support
(3rd line)
12 | Cryptography as a Service 23rd May 2013
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13. System Mechanics - Onboarding
Administrative process for enrolling new business application to BCAG
Capture Business Requirements
The most difficult part as the business does not usually have a structured description of cryptographic requirements
Convert BR to policy specification
Semi-automated process that generates a BCAG policy definition
Amend BCAG access control with new “user” privileges
Key generation and deployment (manual or semi-automatic process)
Use.
13 | Cryptography as a Service 23rd May 2013
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14. Mechanics - Operation And 3 pieces of information that have to align:
Authentication details = username and password
Policy = username and authorised operations and key locator data
Crypto Key definitions = key value and key locator data
14 | Cryptography as a Service 23rd May 2013
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15. Doing Crypto - Key Lookup
Traditionally
Key Label = Key Value
You change a key value, you get a new key label
The new key label has to be propagated to all applications using the old key
BCAG Approach
Structured key locators: user, function, base_function, from, to
Algorithm for locating keys
Dynamic, as it does not use 1:1 mapping but lookup algorithm
Efficient – 2 layers of caching of recently used keys
15 | Cryptography as a Service 23rd May 2013
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16. Key Lookup – BCAG 16 | Cryptography as a Service 23rd May 2013
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17. Beyond Large data processing; we talk about
Daily encryption of giga and terabytes of data
Protection of archives with 100,000s of DB tables
Composite cryptography
Grouping cryptographic operations into transactions that require specific order of operations
Breach of a transaction is a potential data compromise
Centralised key management
Replacement of manual key loading to HSMs with an automatic process to minimise human errors and increase security
17 | Cryptography as a Service 23rd May 2013
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18. Beyond … banking Platform for mobile app cryptography
Platform for financial services for future applications
Providing API and system for banking transactions to developers without actually building a bank
Being able to build own virtual Central Bank with a few button clicks
All this requires something like BCAG to:
Access to payment schemes (VISA, MasterCard)
Strong cryptographic system able to ensure pre-defined security properties (like cheating, counterfeiting … within the model of a virtual world)
In some cases compliance with financial regulations
18 | Cryptography as a Service 23rd May 2013
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19. Thank you for your attention!

20. Security Policy – Two Abstractions
Use - Visible for Business Units
Users
just names, possibly with domain (e.g., LDAP)
And authentication options (specs for tickets)
User groups – just names
Alias – just names for required crypto operations
Manage - Internal to Crypto Management
Params – the technical bit, e.g.
[PARAMS CookieParams]
ManagedEncryption=false
Cipher=AES
KeySize=128
ModeOfOperation=CBC
IV=Random
Padding=NoPad
20 | Cryptography as a Service 23rd May 2013
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21. Doing Crypto - Key Lookup as You Know It
21 | Cryptography as a Service 23rd May 2013
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