An Assessment Framework for Application-Level Cryptographic Agility

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 11 Jun 2026] An Assessment Framework for Application-Level Cryptographic Agility Navaneeth Rameshan, Gregoire Messmer The impending post-quantum transition to new cryptography will require complete replacement of algorithms within all software. The cryptographic APIs used today make this transition challenging because they were not designed with agility as a concern. There is no method for systematically assessing cryptographic agility as an overall ability. In addition to this, the term itself refers to multiple independent capabilities. Specifically, it includes replacing algorithms, selecting by policy, and substituting implementations. This lack of structured decomposition limits both the evaluation of systems and the development of cryptographically agile APIs. We introduce a component-based assessment framework that characterizes application-level cryptographic agility along seven orthogonal dimensions: three coupling dimensions that measure what the application code knows about algorithms and providers, a cross-cutting decoupling mechanism, a governance authority dimension, and two agility enablers that measure actual migration capability. The framework is non-linear and captures non-hierarchical profiles: a system may achieve high operation decoupling yet low creation decoupling, or strong versioning without externalized configuration. We evaluate six representative APIs (PKCS#11, OpenSSL~3.0, JCA, Google Tink, AWS KMS, and HashiCorp Vault Transit) against the framework, revealing three pervasive and independent gaps: no system supports intent-based key creation, none provides policy-driven algorithm selection (as distinct from access control), and none offers dedicated/first-class operations for algorithm transformation of existing keys. These gaps are individually sufficient to prevent agile migration, explaining why the post-quantum transition remains a software engineering problem despite decades of API progress. Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) Cite as: arXiv:2606.13425 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2606.13425v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.13425 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Navaneeth Rameshan [view email] [v1] Thu, 11 Jun 2026 14:54:10 UTC (709 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-06 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)