Understanding Cryptographic Security: What is it and Why is it Important?

Cryptographic security is a critical layer of modern cybersecurity, protecting everything from digital payments to remote access. In this article, we break down the core components of cryptography, how it’s used in practice, and why effective key management is essential for maintaining trust, compliance, and resilience.

Cryptographic security refers to the use of mathematical techniques — encryption, hashing, and digital signatures — to protect information and ensure that only authorized parties can access or alter it. It underpins everything from secure logins and online payments to email authentication and system integrity.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defines cryptographic security as the “protection resulting from the proper use of technically sound cryptosystems.” A cryptosystem is a combination of tools used to encode and decode sensitive information.

At its core, cryptographic security serves three goals:

1. Confidentiality: Preventing unauthorized access.
2. Integrity: Ensuring data hasn’t been altered.
3. Authentication: Verifying the source of information.

When data is stored, transmitted, or accessed, cryptographic mechanisms work behind the scenes to ensure only authorized parties can access or modify information.

Why Is Cryptographic Security Important?

Today’s organizations rely on cryptographic security to protect more than just confidential data — they depend on it to preserve trust. From online banking and cloud applications to digital identities and code integrity, cryptography enables the secure experiences that drive the global economy.

Below are some of the many reasons cryptographic mechanisms are so critical:

• Maintaining Digital Integrity: Whether you're running an e-commerce site or managing citizen data for a government agency, cryptographic tools, such as encryption and digital signatures, ensure that sensitive information isn't tampered with in transit or at rest.
• Mitigating Financial Losses: Failing to secure cryptographic assets — like encryption keys or digital certificates — can result in data breaches, regulatory penalties, and costly downtime. Globally, the average cost of a data breach is $4.9 million. Identity-based cyber threats can also lead to fraud, costing organizations an average of $7 million annually.
• Preventing Unauthorized Access: From remote employee logins to customer onboarding, cryptography enables secure access to the essential digital services consumers, citizens, and workforces rely on every day.
• Meeting Compliance Mandates: Many regulatory frameworks mandate the use of strong cryptographic controls to secure personal data, digital transactions, and business systems. Without these controls in place, organizations risk failed audits, penalties, or even being barred from doing business in certain markets.
• Protecting Customer Relationships: Consumers and partners expect their data to be secure. A robust cryptographic posture not only reduces security risk but also reinforces commitment to privacy and digital trust. By mitigating cyber threats, organizations can avoid reputational damage and keep their customers happy.

In short, cryptographic security underpins the systems and experiences that drive modern business. Organizations that treat it as a strategic priority — not just a compliance checkbox — are better positioned to innovate safely, earn trust, and defend against evolving threats.

Symmetric Encryption vs. Asymmetric Encryption

Encryption is one of cryptography’s foundational pieces. It transforms readable information into an unreadable format to ensure confidentiality. This mitigates the risk of unauthorized access, ensuring only authorized individuals can decrypt the data.

There are two primary types of encryption used in cryptographic systems:

1. Symmetric encryption uses a single key to both encrypt and decrypt data. It’s fast and efficient, making it ideal for encrypting large volumes of data at rest.
2. Asymmetric encryption, also known as public key cryptography, uses a pair of keys: one public and one private. This model supports secure key exchange and digital signatures, which are foundational to protocols like Transport Layer Security (TLS) and systems like public key infrastructure (PKI).

Most enterprise environments rely on a hybrid model that combines both methods to maximize security and performance.

Cryptographic security isn’t one single technology — it’s an ecosystem of components that work together to protect sensitive data, verify identity, and enable trust. These cryptographic mechanisms fall into a few general categories:

Cryptographic Algorithms

Algorithms are the math that makes cryptographic security work. They perform functions like data encryption or hashing. Examples include:

• Advanced Encryption Standard (AES): AES is the symmetric encryption algorithm used to secure stored data. It encrypts data in fixed-size blocks using a single secret key, making it ideal for securing large volumes of data, like databases.
• Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC): ECC is an asymmetric cryptographic algorithm that enables strong data encryption, key exchange, and digital signatures using relatively small key sizes. This results in faster computations and lower power consumption, making ECC especially useful in mobile and cloud environments.
• Secure Hash Algorithm 2 (SHA-2): SHA-2 is a family of cryptographic hash functions used to generate unique, fixed-length representations of data. Hashes help verify data integrity, ensuring that nothing has been altered during storage or transmission. SHA-2 is foundational to digital signatures, TLS certificates, and blockchain transactions.

The choice of algorithm affects the speed, strength, and applicability of your cryptographic systems.

Protocols

Protocols define how cryptographic methods are applied to real-world scenarios, such as secure communication or authentication. In other words, protocols are instructions that describe how a cryptographic algorithm works. Examples include:

• Transport Layer Security: TLS is the foundation of secure communication over the internet. It protects data in transit — such as between browsers and servers — by encrypting it and verifying the identities of both parties. TLS is what gives websites the HTTPS designation and is also widely used in email and messaging platforms.
• Internet Protocol Security (IPSec): IPSec secures data at the network layer, making it especially useful for establishing secure tunnels in virtual private networks (VPNs). It authenticates and encrypts each IP packet in a session, ensuring that data isn’t intercepted or tampered with during transmission.
• Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (S/MIME): MIME adds end-to-end encryption and digital signing to email communications. It ensures that only the intended recipient can read a message and that the message has not been altered in transit or sent by an impersonator.

These protocols are critical for securing everything from online banking and remote work to internal enterprise applications and machine-to-machine communication.

Cryptographic Techniques

Techniques describe how algorithms are applied in practice to secure data or validate identity. These include:

• Encryption: This cryptographic method converts readable plaintext into ciphertext to protect confidentiality. Only someone with the correct key can decrypt and access the original content.
• Hashing: Hashes create a fixed-length output from data to verify integrity. Even a small change in input results in a dramatically different output. Because it’s a one-way function, hashing is used to verify data integrity — for example, checking if a file or password has been altered.
• Digital Signatures: Digital signatures use asymmetric cryptography to sign data with a private key. The recipient can then verify that signature using the sender’s public key. This process proves both the authenticity of the sender and the integrity of the message, making it critical for secure communications, legal documents, and software updates.
• Key Exchange: Key exchange techniques allow two parties to securely share an encryption key over a potentially untrusted network.

Each technique plays a different role in building secure cryptosystems, and they are often layered together to create robust, end-to-end protection.

Infrastructure

Cryptographic systems integrate protocols, algorithms, and techniques into a framework for managing cryptographic operations at scale. Below are a few important pieces of that infrastructure:

• Public Key Infrastructure (PKI): PKI is the system that issues, manages, and revokes digital certificates. It enables secure authentication for users, devices, and services by tying public keys to verified identities. PKI is foundational to trust models in everything from website security to secure email and code signing.
• Hardware Security Modules (HSMs): HSMs are tamper-resistant hardware devices that securely generate, store, and manage cryptographic keys. They provide a physical root of trust for critical cryptographic operations and are essential for industries that require high assurance, like finance and government.
• Key Management Systems: These solutions control the lifecycle of cryptographic keys from creation to retirement. They provide centralized visibility, helping organizations enforce policy, reduce human error, and meet compliance requirements across cloud, on-prem, and hybrid environments.

Together, these infrastructure components ensure that cryptographic controls are not only strong but also scalable, enforceable, and auditable across the enterprise.

Cryptographic security enables secure experiences across nearly every industry and digital workflow. Whether you’re sending a confidential email or authenticating a device on a network, encryption and identity verification are quietly working behind the scenes.

Here are just a few examples of how organizations use cryptography in practice:

1. Digital Payments

   Every time a consumer uses a credit card online or taps a phone at a point-of-sale terminal, cryptography is at work. Encryption protects sensitive payment details in transit, while tokenization and digital signatures verify transaction authenticity. Without strong cryptographic controls, digital payments would be vulnerable to fraud and interception.

    

2. Secure Communication

   Applications, including messaging platforms, video conferencing tools, and email clients, rely on cryptographic protocols to encrypt messages and ensure that only the intended recipient can read them. In enterprise settings, secure communication is essential for protecting intellectual property, trade secrets, and internal operations.

    

3. Document Signing

   Digital signatures allow individuals and organizations to sign electronic documents in a way that proves both the signer’s identity and the document’s integrity. This is crucial in industries like legal, healthcare, and finance, where signed contracts, prescriptions, or disclosures must remain tamper-proof and verifiable.

    

4. Code Signing

   Before deploying software updates or applications, developers use digital signatures to certify that the code hasn’t been altered. Devices and systems can then verify these signatures before installation. This protects users from malware disguised as legitimate software and helps maintain trust in the software supply chain.

    

5. Compliance

   Many regulations and industry standards mandate specific cryptographic controls. For example:

   • The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard requires strong encryption for storing and transmitting cardholder data.
   • The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act mandates safeguards to protect electronic protected health information.
   • The Electronic Identification, Authentication and Trust Services Regulation and the General Data Protection Regulation both impose strict requirements for secure digital identities and data protection within the European Union.

By implementing strong cryptographic practices, organizations can achieve compliance more easily, reduce audit complexity, and minimize the risk of fines or reputational harm.

Strong encryption is only as secure as the keys behind it. That’s why key management — the process of generating, storing, distributing, rotating, and retiring cryptographic keys — is central to any cryptographic security strategy.

Even the strongest encryption can be rendered useless if cryptographic assets are poorly managed. Common risks include:

• Key Sprawl: As organizations expand into hybrid and multi-cloud environments, they often create cryptographic keys in ad hoc across teams, systems, and vendors, leading to poor visibility, duplication, and unmanaged risk.
• Shadow Crypto: Developers or departments may implement cryptographic tools independently, outside of IT or security governance. These hidden implementations are difficult to audit and may not follow security best practices, increasing the risk of undetected exposures.
• Expired Certificates: Certificates used to authenticate services and encrypt communications must be renewed regularly. If a certificate expires unnoticed — as in the case of the 2017 Equifax breach — it can break trust, disable monitoring tools, or create exploitable gaps in coverage.
• Lack of Visibility: Many organizations struggle to answer basic questions: Where are all our keys and certificates? Who has access to them? Are they being rotated as required? Without centralized insight, it’s nearly impossible to enforce policy or detect misuse.

These issues can lead to costly outages, failed audits, and security breaches.

Fortunately, Entrust’s Cryptographic Security Platform addresses these challenges at scale. With centralized visibility, policy enforcement, and lifecycle automation, it’s much easier to inventory, manage, and rotate keys across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

By consolidating cryptographic operations into a single, unified system, the platform simplifies management, reduces risk, and ensures that encryption truly delivers on its promise of security.

Quantum computing has the potential to break today’s most widely used encryption algorithms. Once scaled, quantum computers will be able to solve certain mathematical problems exponentially faster than classical computers, rendering many algorithms obsolete.

Adversaries are already harvesting encrypted data today with the expectation that they’ll be able to decrypt it in the future, once quantum capabilities mature. This is especially concerning for organizations that handle long-lived or high-value data such as intellectual property, medical records, or classified government information.

That’s why many cybersecurity experts recommend preparing now for post-quantum cryptography (PQC). Forward-thinking organizations are already preparing for this transition by:

• Assessing cryptographic agility — the ability to swap out algorithms or update cryptographic systems without overhauling infrastructure.
• Inventorying where and how encryption is used across applications, data flows, and certificates.
• Piloting hybrid approaches that combine classical and quantum-safe algorithms to ensure compatibility during the migration period.

Entrust is leading the charge in helping organizations become quantum-ready. Our PQC solutions and Cryptographic Center of Excellence provide the tools and guidance needed to inventory and prioritize your data and cryptographic assets. That way, you can safely transition to the post-quantum future.

Cryptographic security is foundational to trust, compliance, and digital resilience. As threats evolve and standards advance, organizations need a partner that can help them stay ahead. Explore the Entrust Cryptographic Security Platform to unify your cryptographic operations and build a future-ready foundation for Data Security.