A method, system, and computer usable program product for providing consistent cryptographic operations in a data processing environment using protected structured data objects are provided in the illustrative embodiments. A data input is received from an originating application by a security plug-in, both the application and the security plug-in executing in the data processing system. A security schema object is received by the security plug-in, the security schema object describing a sequence of cryptographic operations, wherein the security schema object includes a plurality of components each component describing an aspect of the cryptographic operations. The data input is transformed into a secure structured data object by the security plug-in using the sequence of cryptographic operations. A property of the secure structured data object is populated using data about the security schema object. The secure structured data object is transmitted to a consumer application.