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Guest View: Lower-level encryption's dirty little secrets


By Ulf Mattsson
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March 2, 2009 —  (Page 1 of 3)
Forget about curious but good-natured hackers. Forget about dangers from not-very-skilled script kiddies. The security stakes are much higher now. As our economy continues to stagger like a drunk on his way home from a bar, we’re going to find that profit-based data breaches will escalate. If there is ever a good time to play with ineffective encryption schemes, this isn’t it.

Yet some of the biggest names in information technology and security—RSA, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft—are currently pushing the use of lower-level encryption at the storage device level or file systems level. It’s a mystery to me why these industry leaders are advocating a flawed process that will not protect data against the ever-increasing number of sophisticated attacks.

Lower-level encryption can sneakily drop-kick even the most well-intentioned enterprise out of compliance and into disarray. You’re sure you’re doing the right thing (after all, IBM said it was the way to go), but all of a sudden you’re listening to a compliance auditor explaining that your enterprise has failed in the separation of duties, data protection and key management areas, and now you need to do a lot of expensive, time-consuming remediation.

Ulf Mattsson
 
We all know it’s better to focus on maintaining strong data security than to center our protection efforts on ever-changing compliance requirements. A secure system is virtually always a compliant system. And as you’ve probably guessed by now, I strongly believe that it's much better to use end-to-end encryption to protect sensitive data while it is in transit and at rest, internally and externally, because part of the sensitive data field (or the whole field) is continuously protected by a transparent encryption wrapper.

Continuous protection is critical because, even if we hate to admit it, IT experts are humans. We’re going to make mistakes and leave some attack vector open, some app unpatched, some bit of something unsecured. The recently released 2008 Verizon Business Data Breach Investigations Report, based on four years of research and forensic examinations of more than 500 companies that suffered a significant data breach, indicated that most breaches result from a mixture of events instead of a single issue, and it noted that a human error often directly or indirectly contributed to the success of the breach. (While the phrase “data breach” conjures up visions of an international attack, accidental, no-evil-intended breaches are quite common.)


Related Search Term(s): databases, security

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