A system and method for detecting lateral movement based on an exposed cryptographic network protocol (CNP) key in a cloud computing environment. The method includes: inspecting a first workload for a private CNP key, the private CNP key associated with a hash of a public CNP key; detecting in a security database a representation of the public CNP key; generating a lateral movement path, the lateral movement path including an identifier of a second workload, the second workload represented by a representation connected to the representation of the public CNP key.