Category Archives: Encryption

AlertBoot New Encryption Compliance Reports Prepare Covered Entities For HIPAA Audits

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Las Vegas, Nevada (PRWEB) January 23, 2014

AlertBoot, a leading provider of mobile device management and full disk encryption managed services, has seen a surge of interest in its services from HIPAA covered entities (CE) and business associates (BA). This high level of interest has been traced back to the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) plan on launching a permanent program for auditing HIPAA compliance efforts in 2014.

Because the Federal Fiscal Year starts on October 1, CEs and BAs are rushing to ensure compliance with the Final Omnibus Rule, which went into effect in September 2013. Although the deadline was over four months ago, many businesses and organizations are still struggling with HIPAA compliance. The approaching permanent program audit scrutinizes all facets of HIPAA and not just technical ones like the presence of HIPAA-compliant full disk encryption prompting CEs and BAs to bolster any PHI data security weaknesses.

"OCR is really stepping up to the plate when it comes to HIPAA breaches," noted Tim Maliyil, CEO and founder of AlertBoot. "While HIPAA has been around since 1996, it's only in the past couple of years that the HHS [Department of Health and Human Services] received the tools and enforcement authority to go after those who don't comply. Now, OCR appears to be set in enacting a program with an eye towards preventing HIPAA breaches. Such an ambitious program requires funding, and there's a good chance it might come from OCR levying fines for HIPAA compliance issues."

Indeed, OCR Director Leon Rodriguez has been quoted as saying that "OCR 'will leverage more civil penalties'" and that the office has "approval to bank penalties it collects to fund enforcement actions across fiscal years."

HIPAA regulations cover a wide berth, from patients' room listings to data on electronic devices, and guidance from multiple experts is necessary in order to completely comprehend the issues. When it comes to laptop encryption, AlertBoot can aid the struggling organization.

The AlertBoot managed full disk encryption solution for laptops is a NIST-validated, FIPS 140-2 approved solution that uses AES-256 encryption. Because HHS defers to NIST when it comes to details regarding encryption technology, covered entities and business associates know that they've addressed HIPAA Security Rule requirements regarding data-at-rest encryption for laptops.

The integrated, customizable reporting facilitates audits and compliance reviews. AlertBoot users can easily prove that computers are encrypted thanks to the cloud-based aspect to the FDE deployment and installation logs, which report on a computer's encryption status throughout its service life. If the computer is lost or stolen, you can present this report as incontrovertible proof that the laptop was protected, triggering safe harbor provisions under the Breach Notification Rule.

A partial list of benefits include:

Learn today why HIPAA covered entities and business associates trust AlertBoot for their data security compliance requirements by contacting sales@alertboot.com.

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AlertBoot New Encryption Compliance Reports Prepare Covered Entities For HIPAA Audits

Australian Encryption | Text encryption software for the protection of your privacy – Video

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Australian Encryption | Text encryption software for the protection of your privacy
Introduction to a fun feature of Encrypt Advanced - text encryption software by Australian Encryption for the protection of your privacy. We show you how qui...

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Australian Encryption | Text encryption software for the protection of your privacy - Video

How Encryption Works – HowStuffWorks "Computer"

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When we use the Internet, we're not always just clicking around and passively taking in information, such as reading news articles or blog posts -- a great deal of our time online involves sending others our own information. Ordering something over the Internet, whether it's a book, a CD or anything else from an online vendor, or signing up for an online account, requires entering in a good deal of sensitive personal information. A typical transaction might include not only our names, e-mail addresses and physical address and phone number, but also passwords and personal identification numbers (PINs).

The incredible growth of the Internet has excited businesses and consumers alike with its promise of changing the way we live and work. It's extremely easy to buy and sell goods all over the world while sitting in front of a laptop. But security is a major concern on the Internet, especially when you're using it to send sensitive information between parties.

Let's face it, there's a whole lot of information that we don't want other people to see, such as:

Information security is provided on computers and over the Internet by a variety of methods. A simple but straightforward security method is to only keep sensitive information on removable storage media like portable flash memory drives or external hard drives. But the most popular forms of security all rely on encryption, the process of encoding information in such a way that only the person (or computer) with the key can decode it.

In this article, you will learn about encryption and authentication. You will also learn about public-key and symmetric-key systems, as well as hash algorithms.

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How Encryption Works - HowStuffWorks "Computer"

Advanced Encryption Standard – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Advanced Encryption Standard (Rijndael)

The SubBytes step, one of four stages in a round of AES

Attacks have been published that are computationally faster than a full brute force attack, though none as of 2013 are computationally feasible:[3]

The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is a specification for the encryption of electronic data established by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2001.[4] It is based on the Rijndael cipher[5] developed by two Belgian cryptographers, Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen, who submitted a proposal to NIST during the AES selection process.[6] Rijndael is a family of ciphers with different key and block sizes. For AES, NIST selected three members of the Rijndael family, each with a block size of 128 bits, but three different key lengths: 128, 192 and 256 bits.

AES has been adopted by the U.S. government and is now used worldwide. It supersedes the Data Encryption Standard (DES),[7] which was published in 1977. The algorithm described by AES is a symmetric-key algorithm, meaning the same key is used for both encrypting and decrypting the data.

In the United States, AES was announced by the NIST as U.S. FIPS PUB 197 (FIPS 197) on November 26, 2001.[4] This announcement followed a five-year standardization process in which fifteen competing designs were presented and evaluated, before the Rijndael cipher was selected as the most suitable (see Advanced Encryption Standard process for more details). It became effective as a federal government standard on May 26, 2002 after approval by the Secretary of Commerce. AES is included in the ISO/IEC 18033-3 standard. AES is available in many different encryption packages, and is the first publicly accessible and open cipher approved by the National Security Agency (NSA) for top secret information when used in an NSA approved cryptographic module (see Security of AES, below).

The name Rijndael (Dutch pronunciation:[rindal]) is a play on the names of the two inventors (Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen).

AES is based on a design principle known as a substitution-permutation network, and is fast in both software and hardware.[8] Unlike its predecessor DES, AES does not use a Feistel network. AES is a variant of Rijndael which has a fixed block size of 128 bits, and a key size of 128, 192, or 256 bits. By contrast, the Rijndael specification per se is specified with block and key sizes that may be any multiple of 32 bits, both with a minimum of 128 and a maximum of 256 bits.

AES operates on a 44 column-major order matrix of bytes, termed the state, although some versions of Rijndael have a larger block size and have additional columns in the state. Most AES calculations are done in a special finite field.

The key size used for an AES cipher specifies the number of repetitions of transformation rounds that convert the input, called the plaintext, into the final output, called the ciphertext. The number of cycles of repetition are as follows:

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Advanced Encryption Standard - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia