In our increasingly digital and globally connected world, cryptographic modules are essential and pivotal elements for protecting sensitive data and enabling digital transformation across various sectors and applications.

To achieve a common and effective certification process for cryptographic modules and reduce the time to market, there are also still some challenges and barriers before achieving a common global approach, such as varying national requirements, test laboratories and test tools disparities, and software/hardware update management differences.

These disparities can result in increased costs, delays, and complexity for manufacturers and users of cryptographic modules avoiding an expansion of the number of certified products and benefits of the certification. Some experts and stakeholders have proposed solutions and recommendations to address these challenges and move towards a more harmonized and streamlined certification process. BSI, the UK’s national standards body, has published two white papers on this topic, which can be found here: Cryptographic Module Certification: The Way Forward and Cryptographic Module Security Certification: Ensuring Data Security with a Common Global Approach and Cryptographic Module Security certification: Ensuring data security with a common global approach. These papers discussed the benefits and challenges of standardizing cryptographic module certification and suggested some best practices and actions to achieve this goal.

As a continuation of this common global approach to cryptographic module certification, BSI (with the support of Huawei and ISO) is happy to convene the cryptographic module ecosystem stakeholders in the next 5th BSI Cryptographic Module Security Hybrid event to be held in Barcelona in a hybrid mode on the 27th February, 2024.