Cryptography engineering
Cryptography has been historically considered one of the hardest-to-get-right, yet most robust defenses against data leakage, tampering and misuse.
Rolling your own crypto is a sin unless you're a cryptographer. Even then, it's still a bit of a sin. We know limits to our knowledge, and we understand where to roll, where to pick existing stuff, and how to adapt it to your product.
Implementing cryptography
is like dancing on a thin ice
False sense of security
Any persistent engineer can invent a security system so clever that they can't think of how to break it. All these systems get broken, of course.
Competence is rare
To build secure cryptographic systems, your team needs to have certain competencies in building, reviewing and breaking such systems. The competence is rare, the competence to find a competence is also rare.
Real-world cryptography is hard
Along with strong security guarantees, cryptography brings unique technological challenges when used in real-life use cases. Marrying cryptography, performance, user experience in a product is hard.
Cryptography misuse
Repurposing "something similar" leads to detrimental results – cryptographic protocols are built for certain use cases, risks, threats and environments. Blindly re-using them is a recipe for disaster.
What it takes to do crypto-based security
Cryptographic design
Many products involve professional data security specialists right from the design phase, to ensure that product decisions take future cryptographic subsystem into account.
Correct verified implementations
Implementing cryptography is hard and requires knowing what to do yourself, what ciphers and libraries to use, and what to avoid.
People with applicable experience
Even if something is implemented, verifying it and getting it to a level needed requires design and implementation review from qualified engineers.
Cossack Labs' difference in cryptography engineering
Applied experience
We make sure that implemented security measures follow a defense in depth approach, are designed efficiently, appropriate to your risks, and fit well with the application architecture.
Trained cryptographers
With extensive cryptographic and software engineering experience, we understand what it takes to match security and cryptography to a product experience.
Real-world, factored in
Even the best security controls are useless if implemented incorrectly. We conduct a security review of individual components, overall application security posture and specific compliance requirements.
Have a question? Let's talk cryptography!
Contact us
We can provide a wide range of cryptography engineering assistance — from handling zk-SNARKs to building end-to-end encrypted mobile apps.
Need novel crypto schemes, cryptographic design validation, or cryptocode audit — our engineers can help you.
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