Digital certificates and encryption keys a growing stress for UK organisations

Home News Security Digital certificates and encryption keys a growing stress for UK organisations Many IT professionals don't know where they are or whether they're safe from attack, says Venafi

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UK IT professionals are starting to worry about encryption keys and certificates. Many dont know how many their organisations possess or even where some are stored. All of them think these assets are now under attack.

These are the findings of a Ponemon report for US key and certificate management firm Venafi, which crunched the views of 2,300 IT professionals from the US, Australia, France, Germany, with 499 from the UK.

Once the bedrock of security, keys and certificates now elicit anxiety. This is perhaps not surprising given the growing number of attacks in which they have been compromised or undermined in a more general way by vulnerabilities such as last years Heartbleed.

The average UK organisation in the survey tended 25,500 keys and certificates, with 4 percent of IT staff saying they had no idea where all of this was kept.

Alluding to a famous Black Hat presentation from 2013, many now feared some kind of cryptoapocalypse, the idea that there might come a time in the relatively near future when the factoring algorithms that underlie todays encryption systems crumble in the face of encryption-cracking systems.

It sounds far-fetched but in truth todays IT teams have more practical worries to occupy them before they start pondering alarming thought experiments designed by mathematicians.

The use of encryption keys and to some extent digital certificates has ballooned in the reports words, making their management incredibly difficult.

Whether they realise it or not, every business and government relies upon cryptographic keys and digital certificates to operate. Without the trust established by keys and certificates, wed be back to the Internet stone age not knowing if a website, device, or mobile application can be trusted, said Venafis vice president of security strategy, Kevin Bocek.

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Digital certificates and encryption keys a growing stress for UK organisations