Assessing the quantum-resistant cryptographic agility of routing and switching IT network infrastructure in a large-size financial organization

This paper provides exploratory research by determining the impact of quantum computing threat on modern routing and switching infrastructure components of IT network infrastructure in a large-size financial organization. We determine whether common routing and switching IT network infrastructure, including its hardware and software components, have enough cryptographic agility to accommodate the change of cryptographic algorithms to the ones that do not exhibit vulnerability to quantum computing and to the ones that are compliant with National Security Agency (NSA) Suite B set of protocols. We pinpoint upstream or downstream impacts of a change in the encryption algorithms across various IT network infrastructure components in terms of effort required to accomplish this transition.

This study is among the first studies that investigate quantum-resistance cryptographic from the hardware perspectives of routing and switching technologies using diffusion of innovation theory. The study integrates enterprise governance to meet the challenges presented by quantum-computing with a focus on cryptographic agility.

We offer an enterprise architecture framework for assessing the dependencies, costs, and benefits of IT infrastructure migration plan to meet the future challenges of quantum-resistant cryptographic. The analysis in this research can be used by IT managers to pre-plan for an upgrade of routing and switching infrastructure, assist in estimating the efforts required to perform these upgrades, and assist in selecting a vendor of routing and switching equipment from the perspective of cryptographic agility. With today's supercomputers, a computational task involved in breaking modern asymmetric cryptographic algorithms would be infeasible due to the required computational complexity. However, with progress in the development of quantum computing technology, firms are facing an increasing risk of potential security threats to existing encrypted data and secured transmission channels as the processing power of quantum computers continue to increase.

Quantum-resistance, Cryptography, Routing and switching, Enterprise architecture, IT governance

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