Body of Knowledge · Data · D3
Crypto keys
Who holds the encryption keys?
53 out of 100 · Partly sovereign
Average of 135 scored findings; 276 findings carry no evidence on this dimension and are not counted.
1. By sector
- Policing 100
- Higher Education 85
- Local Government 75
- Schools 67
- NHS 54
- BBC 44
- Central Government 36
- Defence 34
- Devolved Governments 5
2. How findings split
- Exposed 62
- Dependent 0
- Partly sovereign 4
- Sovereign 69
How we score it
Each finding is scored 0 (exposed) to 3 (sovereign) from the evidence field below; the page index is the average, scaled to 100.
- key custody
- Customer (on-prem) 3
- HYOK 3
- BYOK 2
- Vendor 0
3. Most exposed
- AWS – national services (Spine 36 services, NHS login, e-RS, 111 DoS, MESH) 0 NHS · NHS – National · Amazon Web Services (NHS England Digital, 2023)
- Microsoft Azure – NHSmail shared tenant, Copilot, NHSE analytics; ICB/trust Azure subscriptions 0 NHS · NHS – National · Microsoft (Find a Tender Service, 2025; Microsoft, n.d.)
- Amazon DynamoDB / Aurora (NHS login and cloud-native Spine services) 0 NHS · NHS – National · Amazon Web Services (Amazon Web Services, 2021)
- NHSmail shared Microsoft Entra ID tenant (directory for ~1.5–1.7m users) 0 NHS · NHS – National · Microsoft (operated by Accenture for NHSE) (PublicTechnology, 2021; Contracts Finder, n.d.)
- NHS login – citizen identity (with iProov face biometric verification) 0 NHS · NHS – National · NHS England (built on AWS); iProov (UK Spending, 2025)
4. Most sovereign
- IT Assist cloud, infrastructure and support services (on-prem estate moving toward public cloud) 100 Devolved Governments · NICS (Department of Finance - IT Assist) · Hewlett-Packard Ireland (Find a Tender Service, 2023)
- Ultra Cyber Multi Link Encryptor (MLE) family – NCSC CAPS-certified SECRET tactical data link crypto 100 Defence · Cross-defence · Ultra Cyber (National Cyber Security Centre, 2026; Defensenews, n.d.)
- Elastic SIEM licences and support for Defensive Cyber Operations big-data analytics 100 Defence · Defensive Cyber Operations · Elastic (via Centerprise International) (UK Spending, 2025)
- MOD Palantir Enterprise Agreement (data analytics licensing & support) 100 Defence · MoD · Palantir (Find a Tender Service, 2026; PublicTechnology, 2026)
- Palantir defence AI/decision-support (strategic partnership) 100 Defence · MoD · Palantir (Computing, 2025; PublicTechnology, 2026)
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