Securing the Future with Cryptographic Inventory 

Cryptographic assets such as encryption keys, digital certificates, and algorithms are the building blocks of digital security. They enable secure logins, verify identities, protect sensitive information, support digital signatures, and maintain trust in online interactions. 

Imagine giving out spare keys of your house for years to family, friends, contractors, but never keeping track of who has them. Some keys are lost, some have been copied without your knowledge, and others are still with people you barely remember. Would you feel safe knowing that anyone, at any time, might still have access to your home? 

That is precisely the situation most organizations are in with their cryptographic inventory today. In the digital world, those “keys” are encryption keys, digital certificates, and cryptographic algorithms. Unlike physical keys, cryptographic assets are constantly multiplying and evolving. Cloud platforms automatically issue short-lived certificates, applications generate new keys on the fly, and APIs or IoT devices often embed cryptography deep within their code.  

What was once a manageable security layer has become a sprawling, fast-moving ecosystem that is increasingly difficult to monitor and control. And it is not just metaphorical: 43% of organizations admit they do not even know what cryptographic assets they own, and this lack of visibility is cited as the biggest hurdle to preparing for post-quantum cryptography (PQC). 

Aging Cryptography and Hidden Vulnerabilities 

Most of today’s cryptographic infrastructure was designed decades ago, long before the cloud, mobile-first applications, or the scale of today’s digital economy. As a result, it is struggling to keep pace with modern demands. Cryptographic keys, certificates, and algorithms are scattered across servers, endpoints, applications, and cloud services, often without proper visibility or governance. Many of these assets are outdated, misconfigured, or simply forgotten. 

The real problem is that these weaknesses often stay hidden until something goes wrong. Certificates may expire quietly and cause unexpected outages, deprecated algorithms such as SHA-1, MD5, RC4, and DES may still be embedded in legacy systems, and organizations may continue to trust obsolete or compromised certificate authorities. These blind spots become easy targets for attackers, who exploit weak or unmanaged cryptography to bypass even the strongest defenses.  

The consequences are serious. A single expired certificate has been known to bring down critical websites and disrupt services for millions of users.  For example, on July 21, 2024, the Bank of England’s CHAPS high-value payment system, which handles thousands of daily transactions, went offline due to an expired SSL/TLS certificate. In fact, a report states that 77% of organizations have experienced outages caused by expired certificates.  

Moreover, outdated or weak algorithms create backdoors that attackers can exploit to steal data, impersonate trusted systems, or corrupt transactions. And it’s not just about security, many organizations fail compliance audits because they lack clear visibility into their cryptographic assets. Yet, despite the risks, many organizations continue to operate without a clear understanding of what cryptographic assets they have, where they are, or whether they are secure or not. 

What is Cryptographic Inventory? 

A cryptographic inventory is a comprehensive record of all cryptographic assets within an organization. Unlike a general IT asset list, a cryptographic inventory focuses only on the components that secure identities, data, and communications. More importantly, it gives you a real-time picture of what’s in use today, not just a static snapshot of what was deployed in the past. 

You can think of it like an up-to-date security ledger. Instead of guessing where keys are stored or which certificates are about to expire, the inventory lays it all out in one place.  

A complete cryptographic inventory typically includes: 

• Encryption keys and certificates, such as TLS/SSL certificates, SSH keys, and code-signing keys. 

• Public and private keys with attributes such as algorithms, key lengths, expiration dates, usage context, and ownership. 

• Cryptographic algorithms, ciphers, and protocols currently in use, including TLS versions, cipher suites, hashing functions, and signature schemes. 

• Trust anchors and keystores such as hardware security modules (HSMs), certificate authorities, operating system trust stores, and cloud KMS environments. 

• Policies and configurations, including key rotation schedules, algorithm restrictions, and cryptographic lifecycle management settings. 

Maintaining this inventory is a dynamic process and not a one-time audit. Modern environments require automated discovery and monitoring across on-premises infrastructure, multi-cloud platforms, applications, networks, and endpoints. This involves scanning file systems for certificates, querying keystores, monitoring containerized workloads, and inspecting live network protocols. The result is a single source of truth that continuously maps all cryptographic assets, their configurations, and their dependencies.  

This visibility helps organizations to: 

• Identify weak or outdated algorithms before they become liabilities. 

• Detect misconfigurations or policy violations. 

• Prevent outages caused by expired or untracked certificates. 

• Understand how cryptographic assets support critical applications and business processes. 

• Map cryptographic assets to applications, APIs, and critical business processes, enabling risk-based prioritization. 

Think of cryptographic inventory as a map of all the keys, certificates, and encryption methods protecting your systems. Without it, you’re basically flying blind. 

The Essentials of a Cryptographic Inventory 

A cryptographic inventory is more than just a list of keys and certificates. It captures contextual information about where, why, and how cryptography is used. This context goes beyond technical attributes such as key type, algorithm, and expiry date to also include business criticality and regulatory requirements. With this richer view, raw data becomes actionable insight, helping organizations identify risks, ensure compliance, and prepare for future changes in cryptography. 

A comprehensive inventory should answer six fundamental questions: 

• What do you have? 
  Identify the cryptographic algorithms, key and certificate types, key lengths, hashing functions, protocols, and standards in use. 

• Where is it all? 
  Map all the systems, applications, databases, cloud services, and network devices that utilize cryptography. 

• Why do you use it? 
  Clarify the purpose of the encryption, whether it is for data confidentiality, integrity, authentication, or regulatory compliance. 

• When are these assets used? 
  Track the lifecycle of each cryptographic asset, including active, expiring, or deprecated items. 

• Who is responsible? 
  Document the teams or individuals responsible for managing and maintaining each cryptographic asset. 

• How is it implemented? 
  Capture implementation details, including cryptographic libraries, configurations, and usage patterns. 

Example of a comprehensive inventory in action: 

A comprehensive cryptographic inventory might include an RSA 2048-bit TLS certificate (What do you have?) active on an AWS Load Balancer (Where is it?), used to encrypt user logins and protect sensitive data (Why do you use it?), valid for 90 days before automatic renewal (When are these assets used?), managed by the Security Operations Team (Who is responsible?), and implemented via OpenSSL with automated CI/CD rotation and strict access controls in HSMs (How is it implemented?). It could also list an AES-256 key for database encryption, a SHA-256 hashing function for code signing, and protocols like TLS 1.3 and SSH, providing a complete view of the technical, operational, and business context of all cryptographic assets. 

By addressing these six dimensions, organizations gain full visibility into their cryptographic environment. This visibility makes it easier to spot risks, sail through audits, respond quickly when something goes wrong, and even get ready for big shifts like PQC migration.  

How to Build a Cryptographic Inventory? 

Building a cryptographic inventory requires a structured, automated, and continuous approach. It is not a one-time project, but an ongoing capability that evolves with your infrastructure. Here are the key steps to building and maintaining an effective cryptographic inventory: 

1. Define Scope and Objectives 

Start by defining what you want the inventory to cover. Will it include only TLS certificates, or extend to all encryption keys, algorithms, and protocols? Defining scope helps prioritize effort and select the right tools. Align cryptographic inventory with compliance requirements, risk areas, and business-critical systems. Start small, focusing on high-impact systems, and expand from there. 

2. Discover Cryptographic Assets 

Manual tracking is not feasible. Use automated discovery tools to scan on-prem systems, cloud KMS, HSMs, container workloads, CI/CD pipelines, applications, endpoints, code repositories, and network traffic. Focus on breadth (finding everything) and depth (capturing rich metadata: owner, algorithm, expiry, usage). Discovery should pull from multiple sources, including network scans, API integrations with cloud and key management platforms, secret management vaults, and source code scanning tools, to ensure no cryptographic asset is overlooked. 

3. Centralize and Normalize Data 

Once cryptographic assets are discovered, aggregate them into a central inventory platform. This makes it easier to manage, analyze, and report on your cryptography. Normalize formats (PEM, DER, JKS, PFX), enrich with context (ownership, application mapping), and remove duplicates. Normalizing them into a consistent format ensures all keys and certificates can be tracked, compared, and managed uniformly. This helps detect duplicates, enforce rotation and expiration policies, simplify audits, and maintain a clear, accurate inventory across diverse systems. 

4. Classify and Assess Risk 

Categorize assets by type, criticality, algorithm strength, expiry status, and policy compliance. Highlight weak keys, deprecated ciphers, and high-risk configurations. This step turns raw inventory data into actionable insights that guide risk mitigation. For example, identifying a TLS certificate using SHA-1 on a public-facing payment API immediately flags a high-severity risk, while an expired self-signed certificate on a test server is low risk and can be remediated later. 

5. Integrate with Processes and Policies 

Link the inventory to your certificate lifecycle management, DevOps pipelines, and compliance workflows. Enforce policies for key rotation, algorithm usage, and certificate issuance. Embed cryptographic hygiene into daily operations, not just annual audits. Automate alerts, renewals, and decommissioning processes wherever possible. Continuously monitor for drift, expired assets, or non-compliance. 

6. Continuously Monitor and Update 

Inventory is not a one-time project. To maintain accuracy and reliability, organizations should follow best practices such as continuous scanning, change detection, real-time alerting, periodic inventory reporting, automated alerts for expiring or rotated keys, and regular audits.

Integrate with SIEM or SOAR tools to monitor crypto events and anomalies, and connect the cryptographic inventory to change management systems to track updates across infrastructure. This approach ensures the cryptographic inventory remains current, actionable, and supports risk management, audit readiness, and future cryptographic migrations like post-quantum cryptography.  

In summary, building and maintaining a cryptographic inventory is an essential part of organizational security and compliance. A structured and continuous approach ensures visibility, reduces risk, and supports informed decision-making across all cryptographic assets.  

Challenges in Creating a Cryptographic Inventory 

Managing cryptographic assets like keys and certificates is critical and increasingly complex. With systems spread across cloud, on-prem, and containers, and new assets created constantly, keeping track of everything is not easy. Here are some of the most common challenges: 

1. Discovery Across Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Environments 
Modern enterprises run a mix of on-premises systems, multiple cloud providers, SaaS platforms, and containerized workloads. Each environment manages cryptography differently, from cloud KMS and service-managed TLS certs to embedded keys in Kubernetes secrets. Finding every cryptographic asset across these environments requires advanced automated scanning and integration with APIs, which many organizations lack. 

2. Shadow IT and Hidden Cryptography 
According to a survey, 59% of organizations see code vulnerabilities as one of the biggest risks to application security. In practice, this often happens when developers hardcode keys into source code, leave credentials embedded in CI/CD pipelines, or set up test environments using self-signed certificates. These “hidden” cryptographic assets often escape official inventories, making them unmanaged, weakly protected, and easy targets for attackers. 

The risks are not theoretical. Hardcoded or exposed secrets have led to significant breaches and data leaks. In 2022, over 3,200 mobile apps leaked Twitter API keys, exposing user data, including direct messages. Symantec found 1,859 apps with AWS tokens, many granting access to private cloud services and millions of files in S3 buckets. Toyota accidentally uploaded keys to GitHub, exposing nearly 300,000 customer records. Even major breaches like Target were fueled by compromised credentials, leading to stolen payment card data, lawsuits, and significant financial damages.  

3. Scale and Ephemeral Assets 
The sheer volume of cryptographic assets is exploding. Large enterprises can have millions of certificates and keys, many of which are short-lived (days or even hours in cloud-native systems). Traditional manual tracking methods like spreadsheets cannot keep up and are prone to errors, omissions, and stale data, making them unreliable for maintaining security at scale. Capturing and continuously updating an inventory that reflects this scale and ephemerality requires real-time, automated discovery.  

4. Ownership and Context Mapping 
Finding a certificate or key is only half the battle. Understanding where it is used, what it protects, and who owns it is far more difficult. Without context, organizations cannot prioritize risks. For example, an expired certificate protecting a test system is not as critical as one securing a public payment API. Mapping ownership and usage dependencies into the inventory is a significant technical challenge. 

5. Integration with Policies and Compliance Frameworks 
A cryptographic inventory is not just a simple list. It must be validated against internal security baselines and external regulations (e.g., PCI DSS, HIPAA, NIST). This means identifying which algorithms are non-compliant, which keys are too weak, or which certificates are nearing expiration. Integrating cryptographic discovery with compliance engines and ensuring continuous validation is both technically complex and resource-intensive. 

Taken together, these challenges explain why so many organizations struggle with visibility and control over their cryptographic assets. The good news is that each of these obstacles can be addressed with the right mix of automation, integration, and policy enforcement.

Effective Ways to Overcome These Challenges 

Overcoming these challenges requires more than patchwork fixes. Organizations need structured, repeatable practices that scale across hybrid environments. Below are proven strategies that help security teams build a resilient and reliable cryptographic inventory: 

1. Automate Discovery Across All Environments 
Deploy automated discovery tools that integrate natively with cloud KMS APIs, container orchestration systems, SaaS platforms, and network scans. This ensures coverage across hybrid environments and eliminates blind spots. 

2. Detect and Eliminate Shadow IT Cryptography 
Integrate secret scanning into DevOps pipelines, CI/CD processes, and code repositories. Enforce policies that prevent the use of self-signed certificates in production and mandate secure vault storage for all keys and secrets. 

3. Manage Scale with Real-Time Monitoring and Automation 
Leverage lifecycle automation tools that detect, catalog, rotate, and retire assets automatically. Avoid spreadsheet-based approaches, which create stale, error-prone inventories that cannot scale with ephemeral assets. 

4. Link Assets to Ownership and Context 
Integrate cryptographic inventories with CMDBs, IAM systems, and application dependency maps. This links assets to owners and business processes, allowing organizations to prioritize remediation based on business impact. 

5. Enforce Continuous Compliance 
Tie your cryptographic inventory with compliance management tools and enforce continuous validation against evolving standards and internal crypto policies. Automate reporting so audits can be passed with minimal manual effort. 

By applying these practices, organizations can turn an overwhelming challenge into a manageable process. The result is stronger security, reduced risk, and a cryptographic environment that is always ready for audits and future transitions like post-quantum cryptography. 

Why Cryptographic Inventory Matters? 

When was the last time you checked what cryptography your organization is actually using? For most organizations, the answer is never, and that’s exactly why a cryptographic inventory matters. In fact, a 2024 survey found that 24% of organizations have little or no confidence in identifying where their data is stored, emphasizing the fundamental need for a comprehensive cryptographic inventory for better data governance and protection. 

Here are five key reasons why every organization needs a cryptographic inventory: 

1. Preventing Service Disruptions 
Expired or untracked certificates have caused some of the world’s most visible outages, from banking apps going offline to halting major cloud services. A complete inventory ensures that organizations can detect certificates approaching expiration and automate renewals, preventing costly downtime and reputational damage. 

2. Reducing Security Risks 
Attackers actively look for weak algorithms, misconfigured keys, or forgotten certificates because they are easy entry points. An up-to-date cryptographic inventory allows organizations to spot outdated algorithms, identify overly permissive configurations, and eliminate hidden attack surfaces before adversaries can exploit them. 

3. Enabling Compliance and Audit Readiness 
Regulators and auditors increasingly expect organizations to prove that cryptography is effectively managed. From PCI DSS to HIPAA and NIST standards, demonstrating control over cryptographic assets is now a compliance requirement. Auditors commonly request evidence such as certificate expiration tracking, key rotation logs, proof of algorithm compliance, and records of access controls. Maintaining a well-organized, centralized cryptographic inventory makes it easier to produce these artifacts quickly and accurately, helping organizations stay audit-ready at all times. 

4. Supporting Crypto-Agility and Future Readiness 
The cryptographic landscape is evolving rapidly, with post-quantum cryptography (PQC) on the horizon. Organizations cannot plan migrations to new algorithms without knowing what algorithms are in use today. An inventory provides the visibility needed to plan, test, and execute transitions with confidence. 

5. Building Digital Trust 
At its core, cryptography underpins trust between businesses and customers, between devices and cloud platforms, and across digital ecosystems. By maintaining a reliable inventory, organizations can prove that their systems are secure, trustworthy, and resilient, strengthening customer confidence and competitive advantage. 

In short, creating and maintaining a cryptographic inventory is not just a technical exercise; it is a foundation for resilience, compliance, and digital trust. Without visibility into cryptographic assets, organizations are effectively flying blind. With it, they gain the ability to manage cryptography as a strategic security function rather than a hidden liability. It reduces operational risks, strengthens defenses, simplifies compliance, and prepares organizations for the cryptographic challenges of tomorrow. 

How can EC help? 

If you’re wondering where and how to get started with securing your cryptographic assets for the post-quantum era, Encryption Consulting is here to support you with its PQC Advisory Services. You can count on us as your trusted partner, and we will guide you through every step with clarity, confidence, and real-world expertise.   

We begin by conducting a thorough discovery and mapping of all your cryptographic inventory, including keys, certificates, algorithms, and their dependencies, giving you a clear picture of what you have and where potential quantum risks lie. This detailed inventory forms the foundation for a prioritized action plan and risk analysis, so you know exactly where to focus. 

From there, we develop a customized, step-by-step migration strategy that fits your business needs and aligns with NIST and NSA guidelines. Our approach includes defining governance and crypto agility frameworks to keep your cryptographic inventory accurate, secure, and adaptable over time. We also assist in evaluating and selecting the best quantum-safe PQC algorithms, key management, and PKI solutions, and run proof-of-concept testing across your critical systems. You also get a detailed vendor comparison report and recommendations to help you choose the best. 

Finally, we help you seamlessly integrate post-quantum algorithms into your existing infrastructure, whether it is your PKI, enterprise applications, or broader security ecosystem. All while keeping your cryptographic inventory continuously updated. We test everything thoroughly before enterprise-wide rollout and offer ongoing monitoring and optimization to keep your cryptographic assets secure and ready for future challenges.  

Reach out to us at [email protected] and let us build a comprehensive cryptographic inventory and customized roadmap that aligns with your organization’s needs and goals.   

Conclusion 

In present times, keeping track of your cryptography is something you can’t skip. An accurate, up-to-date cryptographic inventory helps you find and fix vulnerabilities early and stay prepared for the challenges posed by emerging quantum threats, all while keeping auditors and customers happy. 

The ultimate payoff of a cryptographic inventory is peace of mind and operational strength. With full visibility into your crypto assets, you can prevent outages and breaches before they happen. Whether you’re still figuring out where to start or ready to dive into implementation, the most important thing is to take that first step and keep the momentum going. And if you’re looking for a partner to walk that path with you, we are here.  

At Encryption Consulting, we are ready to help you move forward with clarity, proven expertise, and a plan that fits your goals. Let us get started and make sure your organization is secure, not just for today, but also for the future.