Comandando el futuro: Cómo la inteligencia de riesgos de Keyfactorle prepara para las amenazas poscuánticas

This year, Keyfactor announced the launch of Command Risk Intelligence, a new component of Keyfactor’s leading Certificate Lifecycle Management and Automation solution, Keyfactor Command.

As organizations prepare for a migration to new cryptographic methods to protect against the looming threat from quantum computing, this new component helps to triage and prioritize these migration needs. 

What is Command Risk Intelligence? 

Command propio Command ofrece a los administradores un "único panel de cristal" para ver fácilmente todo su inventario de activos PKI, ayudando a emitir, desplegar, rastrear y reemplazar certificados empresariales a escala.

Risk Intelligence builds on the capabilities of the base platform, expanding the certificate inventory deeper into the public web footprint and adding new tools to surface and detect actionable risk evident in a certificate inventory. Each certificate is run through a rules engine, inspecting it for a wide variety of defects and quantifying the level of danger into a “risk score”.  

Estas funciones ayudan a los administradores a identificar claves inesperadamente débiles, autoridades de certificación mal configuradas para aplicar la política de la organización y certificados que no aparecen en línea como se esperaba.

Development of Command Risk Intelligence has required careful consideration of the impact of a number of emerging technologies and their confluence within the enterprise security space.  

The Rise of Predictive Threat Intelligence 

Continued advances in cloud computing have made factoring attacks against RSA keys ever easier, as described in our older research. Generative and Agentic AI continues to redefine how IT administrators interact with enterprise software, while at the same time opening new ways for attackers to exploit security defects.

Y eso por no hablar de los coches autónomos, los dispositivos médicos autorregulados y otras aplicaciones vitales de la tecnología conectada que podrían verse afectadas por problemas de seguridad.

Nuestro objetivo es ofrecer la mejor protección posible frente a estos problemas, por ejemplo implementando análisis en Command Risk Intelligence para detectar certificados vulnerables a ataques de factorización. Para proteger frente a las amenazas de IA, ejecutamos cada certificado a través de una regla de aprendizaje automático que podría proporcionar información sobre el nivel de riesgo que un modelo podría percibir que representa un certificado a primera vista, y señalamos los problemas más graves a la atención de los administradores para una defensa proactiva frente a dichas amenazas.

Como afirma Gartner en la publicación de junio "Emerging Tech: The Rise of AI-Based Predictive Threat Intelligence":

El rápido aumento y expansión de la dependencia de los activos digitales en Internet ha ha envalentonado a los actores de amenazas con una amplia gama de objetivos y opciones de explotación. Esto, combinado con la capacidad de los actores de amenazas para aprovechar la tecnología de IA, impulsa la necesidad urgente de esfuerzos más concertados para automatizar la seguridad con capacidades de defensa basadas en IA.

The reasoning Keyfactor has employed in developing the Risk Intelligence Module is closely aligned with these conclusions from Gartner. However, no combination of such measures is adequate to protect against risks to systems in use today from the advent of practical quantum computers, which stand to render all RSA and ECC keys in use obsolete in the coming years.

Aunque los riesgos de la IA suponen una amenaza en la actualidad, no provocan que las claves fundamentalmente seguras se vuelvan inseguras.

Los esfuerzos deben centrarse en identificar los puntos débiles y apuntalarlos de forma proactiva para garantizar que todos los recursos proporcionan el beneficio de seguridad esperado. El riesgo de la computación cuántica es, pues, un riesgo muy diferente para los certificados de empresa, y aunque todavía puede pasar algún tiempo hasta que los impactos prácticos sobre la criptografía sean significativos, los impactos normativos ya han comenzado.

The ultimate impact of quantum computing on cryptography will be even larger than that of AI, because it will require replacement of all keys, not just select high-risk keys. Our Command Risk Intelligence component, then, needed to account for this risk. 

NIST Guidelines and Key Deprecation Timelines 

The key regulatory timeline began last year, when the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released the initial public draft of its landmark guideline, NIST IR 8547, calling for migration to new, “quantum-safe” cryptographic algorithms by Jan 1, 2030 or Jan 1, 2035 for different applications. This guidance is rooted in NIST’s belief that RSA and ECC keys will cease providing appropriate security in this timeframe.

An adversary with a sufficiently powerful quantum computer can rederive the RSA or ECC private key, and use this to impersonate servers, decrypt traffic, sign malware, and perform other sensitive operations with the trusted credential.  

This guidance is also essentially independent from NIST’s requirements for key sizes needed to protect against classical computers rederiving a private key. This has been updated numerous times already – RSA-512 gave way to 1024, 2048, and so on. As computers get more powerful, they are able to break larger and larger keys despite the exponential complexity in doing so. Under this progression, RSA-2048 – by far the most common key size found online – is scheduled for deprecation under this older guidance as well.  

The “Harvest Now, Decrypt Later” Problem  

Taking these two sets of guidelines together, then, NIST is essentially saying that keys in widespread use today will be vulnerable to multiple vectors within a decade. But this very much does not mean that it is safe to use RSA-2048 keys for all applications right up to the first deadline.

One of the most pernicious issues is a “harvest now, decrypt later” attack. State-level and other sophisticated actors are able to capture traffic of interest flowing across networks over TLS. In many cases, even when the data cannot be decrypted today, it can be preserved, then decrypted when computers – classical, quantum, or otherwise – are powerful enough to rederive the private key.

Sin duda, algunos datos revelados de esta manera habrán pasado el punto de utilidad, pero mucha otra información seguirá siendo muy valiosa.

As an easy example, I now have credit cards with expiration dates in the 2030s. If I buy something in 2029, and the vendor has been procrastinating for the NIST cutoff date, someone who is able to harvest and subsequently decrypt that info would be able to obtain my valid credit card number. As the cutoff date approaches, an even larger fraction of the data captured in this way will be valuable, and the incentive for bad actors to harvest it will increase. There are mitigations against this risk, such as the use of Forward Secrecy, a property that can be configured for many TLS communications but that is not universally adopted. However, the best mitigation is to replace all of the certificates on these traditional algorithms with quantum-safe cryptography. 

Por desgracia, es más fácil decirlo que hacerlo.

The algorithms have been standardized for less than a year. There are major TLS clients like Safari that still do not support these algorithms. Organizations must discover their vulnerable keys, triage them, obtain a solution for issuing new quantum-safe replacements, and perform a large number of system reconfigurations, installing new keys and newly-signed software.

Keyfactor’s technology stack helps with every one of these tasks: 

• EJBCA issues new quantum-safe certificates to replace the legacy certs 
• Command automates tracking and replacement of certificates 
• BouncyCastle allows application developers to support quantum-safe cryptographic algorithms in their own applications 
• SigNum y SignServer permiten firmas digitales seguras desde el punto de vista cuántico

With Keyfactor’s recent acquisitions of  the CipherInsights and AgileSec Analytics platforms, Keyfactor offers new ways to discover impacted keys for triage. Risk Intelligence’s role is in this step, helping organizations to determine which systems are most critically at risk and triage their certificates by priority for replacement.

How Risk Intelligence Quantifies Quantum Risk 

Para ello, tenemos en cuenta varios detalles sobre el certificado.

The first detail is its expiration date. The easy case is if it expires after Jan 1, 2035. This is past all of the deadlines related to security for both quantum and classical computers, and all key sizes will be considered broken, leading to a “CRITICAL” violation (risk score of 1000). For certificates expiring between Jan 1, 2030 and Jan 1, 2035, we use a geometric scale based on the expected key sizes during this timeframe. Now, due to the threat of quantum computing, again, all RSA and ECC keys are nominally at risk during this period.

Sin embargo, tanto para los ordenadores cuánticos como para los clásicos, las claves más pequeñas se romperán primero, y las claves más grandes corren menos riesgo.

Due to this risk, all sizes of RSA and ECC are scored at least as HIGH risk (100-999 risk score). But then we begin to differentiate based on the number of “bits of security”, which is a way to standardize key strength regardless of different key types having a different number of bytes.  

Esta normalización es necesaria porque, por ejemplo, las claves RSA contienen el producto de dos grandes números primos. Escribir estos números requiere mucho espacio, pero la densidad de información es menor. Así, se considera que una clave RSA 3072 tiene 128 bits de seguridad. Esto se consideraría seguro contra un ordenador clásico en 2030-2034, pero no contra un ordenador cuántico. Por tanto, le asignamos una puntuación de 100. Sin embargo, una clave con sólo 127 bits también se consideraría marginalmente deficiente frente a un ordenador clásico, por lo que le asignamos una puntuación más alta, de 500. A medida que el tamaño de la clave disminuye, la potencia de cálculo -de cualquier tipo- necesaria para descifrarla disminuye, y el número de partes con capacidad para hacerlo aumenta exponencialmente.

Therefore, the risk score increases until we get to 111 bits or below (RSA 2048 or ECC 224 contain 112), at which point we say the certificate has a CRITICAL risk of 1000. Between 112 and 127 bits, we interpolate on a geometric scale; given that 111 bits maps to a score of 1000 and 128 bits to 500, this leads to the formula RISK = 1000*0.955(SECURITY_BITS – 112).  

For certificates expiring before 2030, at first glance, this quantum-readiness logic might not seem to apply. But going back to the “harvest now, decrypt later” and the credit cards today with expiration dates in the 2030s, it is essential to consider the lifetime needs of the data protected by these certificates.

También es concebible que los ordenadores cuánticos maduren en un plazo más rápido de lo que el NIST ha contemplado, debido a desarrollos imprevistos -quizás las tecnologías contemporáneas de IA ayuden a la investigación y el desarrollo. Esto significa que a las claves que cumplen las normas mínimas publicadas para los requisitos de seguridad en la actualidad, pero que no cumplirían los requisitos en 2030, se les seguirá asignando una pequeña puntuación de riesgo de "1", destinada simplemente a incitar a la consideración de este riesgo.

Naturalmente, los certificados que incumplen incluso los mínimos actuales reciben una puntuación más alta. En el peor de los casos, RSA 1024 (80 bits) ya se puede romper con tan sólo 7 cifras USD de coste computacional, y se le dará una puntuación CRÍTICA de 1000.

At the milder end, certificates that are just under today’s minimum will be given a score of 100. Again, we interpolate for keys whose bits of security is between 81 and 111, using the formula RISK = 1000*0.926(SECURITY_BITS – 81) to align with the scores at the end of the range. 

What’s Next in Quantum Risk Assessment 

Esta lógica por partes está llamada a evolucionar a medida que las estrategias de migración cuántica sigan desarrollándose en los próximos años.

As the 2030s deadlines approach, it is expected that future versions of Command Risk Intelligence will weigh these risks progressively higher, and will eventually flag all RSA and ECC certificates as critical risks. As with any of the other findings coming from Risk Intelligence, having this information about your possible exposure surfaced in your crypto-agility platform gives you the power to quickly and easily monitor and remediate keys that are not providing the appropriate security value for your organization.  

¿Le preocupan las amenazas de IA o cuánticas a sus activos criptográficos? Hable con nuestros expertos en seguridad sobre Command Risk Intelligence.