The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is working with federal agencies, such as the departments of Energy and Education, to advance the adoption of post-quantum cryptography, or PQC, algorithms, NextGov/FCW reported Wednesday.
To support that effort, CISA is helping agencies harmonize legacy technologies with software platforms such as automated cryptography discovery and inventory, or ACDI, tools and is collaborating with the National Institute of Standards and Technology to perform assessments on such tools.
“There’s a lot going on in that space,” Garfield Jones, associate chief of strategic technology for CISA, told the publication. “We’re working with NIST on some assessments for ACDI tools to possibly go into any of the agencies.”
“What we’re doing is trying to leverage those legacy tools to … cover the gaps that are there for PQC, and then as we go along we’re going to get those new ACDI tools,” Jones noted.
Purpose of Inventory & Discovery
According to the CISA executive, the inventory and discovery process seeks to ensure that legacy software and new ACDI tools function well alongside current cybersecurity frameworks.
“We don’t want to burden any of the systems down with any of the performance elements of these tools,” Jones stated. “We don’t know necessarily if they’ll work well together. The interoperability issue is another piece to that. So those are things that we’re definitely looking at.”