Against the backdrop of rising malware threats and organized cybercriminal rings, a national cybersecurity initiative is taking shape which will bring a "locked down" mentality to the way we authenticate users, apps, and anyone or anything that touches a network. I'm talking about the Cryptographic Key Management (CKM) project that is being run out of the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Computer Security Division.Of course, keys are not a new thing, they've long been used in what amounts to a sophisticated security handshake so that there's some assurance there's no bad guy on the other end before you grant network access or hand over information. It's also true, as a CKM report noted, that "nearly all Internet security protocols use cryptography for authentication, integrity and/or confidentiality."

What's different this time is that there's an overarching effort to figure out how to extend and implement keys so that they're universally applied on the Internet -- and thus by extension, on all networks everywhere -- not only for legacy stuff, but also in emerging areas of concern including cloud security, as well as the plugging of holes that routinely exist for wireless authentication.

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