Easing Transitions to New Cryptography with Structured Data Folding with Transmutations (SDFT)

Structured Data Folding with Transmutations (SDFT) provides a framework for producing portable, secure messages enabling facile cryptography transitions indefinitely. As ciphers age and exhibit fallibility, new ciphers are introduced resulting in a parade of cryptography transitions over time. SDFT streamlines cipher transitions at the message level for both data-at-rest and data-in-transit. SDFT advances beyond concepts of Message Level Security (MLS) by allowing every SDFT message to self-describe and self-prescribe how the message within was produced. Cipher transitions are introduced with various levels of urgency by each organization. Custom cryptography implementations will incur high transition costs due to a shortage of qualified experts. Indifference or ignorance can lead to catastrophic data breaches as adversaries resort to retrospective decryption attacks. Even the best cryptography transitions may introduce new flaws into the application, leading to less security than expected. We will research and prototype to extend the existing SDFT Python library to handle the latest NIST PQC candidate algorithms and show why SDFT messages should be a new standard and best practice in industrial and government cipher technologies.