The Cryptographic Layer is the stratum that provides confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity primitives to the layers above. It sits above the Hardware Layer, which supplies entropy and acceleration, and below identity, consensus, and security strata that depend on its guarantees. It contains ciphers, hash functions, signature schemes, and key management.
Semantic Classification
Content
- The Cryptographic Layer supplies the mathematical guarantees on which trust in distributed systems rests. Typical members include symmetric and asymmetric ciphers, cryptographic hash functions, digital signatures, key derivation, and the secure storage and rotation of keys. It provides primitives rather than complete protocols.
- It requires the Hardware Layer for secure random number generation and acceleration, and it enables the Identity Layer to bind keys to subjects and the Consensus Layer to authenticate messages. The strength of these primitives bounds the security claims of everything above.
- The layer bridges to public key cryptography and the hash function, the building blocks of modern security. Algorithm and key-length choices made here set the margin against present and anticipated attacks.