Crypto Agility: Adapt or Be Left Behind

If cryptography were a suit of armour, most organisations would still be wearing battle gear built for wars long past—heavy, trusted, and dangerously outdated. When the enemy changes tactics—from swords to lasers—you don’t want to be stuck in steel plate. You want the ability to switch, swiftly and decisively. That ability is what we call crypto agility.

Crypto agility isn’t a new algorithm or a single tool. It’s the ability to switch cryptographic methods, libraries or protocols without tearing apart your software infrastructure. In essence, it’s future-proofing by design. Imagine owning a fleet of electric vehicles where you can remotely upgrade the battery tech or swap out the engine entirely depending on changing regulations. That’s crypto agility in action: flexibility embedded from the start, allowing systems to evolve alongside threats.

While our recent blog on quantum-safe cryptography explored the risks posed by quantum computing and the algorithms being designed to withstand those threats, crypto agility is something different. Quantum-safe cryptography is a tactic—a necessary next step—but crypto agility is the strategy that allows you to keep taking those steps, over and over again. Algorithms will evolve. Threats will shift. Crypto agility means your systems are ready to shift with them.

The past has already shown us how critical this is. In 2017, the SHA-1 hashing algorithm was shattered by researchers using nothing more than commercial cloud computing. Those with agile cryptographic systems switched to SHA-256 and other more secure options quickly. Others faced full-blown technical overhauls, incurring both cost and risk. The lesson wasn’t just about SHA-1. It was about the need to move—fast—when the ground beneath your encryption shifts.

And it will shift again. With quantum threats no longer science fiction, the next generation of cryptographic standards is already emerging. But the risk isn’t only in the algorithms themselves. It’s in how deeply they’re embedded across countless open source libraries, frameworks, and packages. Which is where SCANOSS comes in.

While SCANOSS doesn’t provide cryptographic primitives or orchestrate migrations, it helps build the foundation for crypto agility by making hidden dependencies and the cryptography they contain visible. Our open source-centric approach scans your codebase and detects outdated or vulnerable uses of cryptographic components—whether in your own code or brought in through third-party libraries. With SCANOSS, you can locate insecure or obsolete algorithms like hardcoded SHA-1 or deprecated encryption methods, even when they're deeply buried in open source packages.

This visibility allows you to take informed action—planning remediation efforts and migrations independently, with a clear understanding of your cryptographic risks. Crypto agility, at its core, is about readiness. Readiness to pivot. Readiness to respond. Readiness to remove outdated trust anchors before they become attack vectors. It’s less about predicting the next standard and more about ensuring you’re never locked into the last one.

If you want your software to keep pace with change, start by making it agile.  SCANOSS won’t upgrade your cryptography for you—but it will show you where to start.

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