Cybersecurity Listings

The cybersecurity service sector in the United States encompasses hundreds of distinct professional categories, vendor types, regulatory frameworks, and technical specializations. This page describes the structure, scope, and classification logic governing listings published on this directory — including which entities and services are eligible for inclusion, how verification status is assigned, and where coverage gaps exist within the current index. Practitioners, procurement officers, and researchers navigating the encryption and cryptographic services landscape will find the classification boundaries here essential for interpreting listing data accurately.

What listings include and exclude

Listings on this directory cover organizations, service providers, and technical resources operating within the encryption, cryptography, and broader cybersecurity compliance sectors in the United States. Eligible listing categories include vendors offering encryption key management platforms, public key infrastructure services, hardware security modules, certificate authorities, compliance consulting firms, and managed security service providers (MSSPs) whose documented service scope includes cryptographic controls.

Listings are drawn from publicly verifiable sources: registered business entities, firms listed in federal contractor databases such as SAM.gov, organizations accredited under NIST's FIPS 140 validation program, and providers whose services appear in published compliance audits under frameworks such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, or FedRAMP. Sole-source assertions — vendor claims made without third-party validation or regulatory record — are excluded from primary listing status.

Exclusions apply to the following categories:

1. Unverified individual consultants lacking traceable professional credentials or published client attestations
2. Products and services that are encryption-adjacent (e.g., general IT support) but do not provide cryptographic functionality as a core service component
3. Foreign-headquartered entities without documented US operations, US-based legal entities, or US regulatory filings
4. Services under active enforcement action by the FTC, SEC, or CISA at the time of index review
5. Deprecated protocol implementations marketed without explicit migration pathways — for example, vendors still offering SSL 3.0 or TLS 1.0 as primary configurations (see Secure Socket Layer deprecation)
6. Products subject to US export restrictions under the Export Administration Regulations (EAR) administered by the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), where those restrictions affect US domestic serviceability

Verification status

Listings carry one of three verification classifications, each reflecting a different depth of source corroboration.

Verified — The entity appears in at least one authoritative federal or accreditation database. Examples include CMVP (Cryptographic Module Validation Program) listings maintained by NIST at csrc.nist.gov, the FedRAMP Marketplace, or the Authorized Certificate Authority list published by the CA/Browser Forum. Verified status does not constitute an endorsement; it indicates documentary traceability.

Provisionally Listed — The entity operates in an eligible service category and has publicly accessible documentation (product datasheets, audit summaries, or regulatory filings) but has not yet been cross-referenced against a federal or accreditation database. This status applies to approximately 40 percent of commercial encryption software vendors in the index, where FIPS 140 validation is pending or not applicable to their specific product class.

Unverified / Reference Only — Entities or tools listed for reference purposes, typically open-source cryptographic libraries or academic research institutions, where formal commercial verification frameworks do not apply. The OpenSSL project and the Bouncy Castle cryptographic API are examples of entries that may appear in this classification.

Researchers cross-referencing listings against NIST Special Publication 800-53 (Revision 5) controls or the NIST cryptographic guidelines should apply verification status as a filter when building procurement shortlists.

Coverage gaps

The current index reflects documented coverage gaps in four identified sectors:

• Post-quantum cryptography vendors: The NIST post-quantum standardization process, which finalized its first 4 algorithms in 2024, has generated a nascent vendor class whose post-quantum cryptography service offerings are not yet systematically indexed. Fewer than 15 US-based commercial providers have published production-ready PQC implementations as of the most recent index review cycle.
• IoT cryptographic services: Vendors specializing in IoT device encryption represent a fragmented market with inconsistent standards adherence. Coverage is partial.
• Healthcare-specific encryption compliance consultants: The market serving HIPAA encryption requirements under 45 CFR Part 164 is dominated by regional boutique firms with limited public documentation, creating systematic underrepresentation in the index.
• Tokenization providers: The boundary between tokenization and encryption is a documented source of regulatory interpretation variance under PCI DSS v4.0, and providers operating exclusively in the tokenization space may not meet the cryptographic core-service threshold for primary listing eligibility.

Listing categories

The directory organizes eligible entities into the following classification structure:

Cryptographic Infrastructure Providers
Vendors delivering public key infrastructure, digital certificate issuance, hardware security modules, and certificate authority services. These providers are typically subject to WebTrust audits or ETSI EN 319 411 compliance assessments.

Encryption Software and Platform Vendors
Products covering full disk encryption, database encryption, email encryption standards, VPN encryption protocols, and cloud encryption environments, including bring-your-own-key architectures.

Compliance and Advisory Services
Consulting firms and auditors whose documented practice areas include PCI DSS encryption requirements, HIPAA technical safeguards, FISMA cryptographic controls, and US export controls on encryption under BIS EAR jurisdiction.

Research and Standards Bodies
Non-commercial entities including NIST, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and academic cryptography programs whose published outputs — RFCs, special publications, and algorithm specifications — inform the technical baseline of the service sector.

Incident Response and Threat-Focused Services
Providers specializing in ransomware and encryption abuse response, encryption algorithm vulnerability assessment, and side-channel attack mitigation, where cryptographic forensics is a primary service component.

The directory purpose and scope page contains the governing criteria applied across all five listing categories.