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Data breaches boost interest in encryption, study says

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Data breaches have for the first time become the main reason businesses implement encryption technology, according to a study of global encryption trends by The Ponemon Institute on behalf of security firm Thales e-Security.

The firm found that 46 percent of the 4800 companies and tech managers questioned from around the world said that the main reason they invested in encryption was that it could lessen the impact of breaches. This beat a desire to protect brand reputation on 44 percent and the 40 percent mentioning compliance as the motivation.

Its perhaps obvious that encryption makes stolen data less useful to criminals but the growing importance placed on protecting data rather than devices shows how the technology has risen from being precautionary measure to that of a frontline defence.

Storing data without encryption, especially customer data, is increasingly unthinkable to many of the respondents, with the U.S. the most emphatic on this point, noted by 59 percent of those questioned. Curiously, some countries fall short of this enthusiasm with France in last place on 35 percent.

The reason is mainly local legislation and compliance regimes, with 61 percent of the U.S. sample reporting that unencrypted customer data would require breach notification as against 33 percent believing notification would be necessary if it was.

On the face of it this is a bit surprising; many U.S. organizations appear to believe that breach notification would not be required simply because the data had been encrypted. It is not clear that this is true although the same divide appears in all countries looked at.

The study also uncovered the usual problems with deploying encryption as well as identifying precisely where the sensitive data resides for it to be applied.

The figures also show that encryption use has doubled since the report was first compiled in 2005, and was now present in 30 percent of organizations. Not surprisingly, financial services leads the way with 43 percent making use of it.

Arguably, encryption use should be much higher. A major barrier remains the complexity of key management. This can also be hugely expensive, or at least firms believe it will be.

Encryption usage continues to be a clear indicator of a strong security posture but there appears to be emerging evidence that concerns over key management are becoming a barrier to its more widespread adoption, said Dr. Larry Ponemon, founder of the Ponemon Institute.

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Data breaches boost interest in encryption, study says

Three college students build a health provider search site in six weeks

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Feb 15, 2014, 03:00 (0 Talkback[s]) (Other stories by Mark Lefcowitz)

In six weeks, a team of three college students with no industry experience and only academic software-specific knowledge, developed and designed a health care provider search system using only open source software. To tell you how they got there, let's start with a little history of open source software in the US federal government workspace.

The open source software (OSS) movement has grown and matured over the past four decades. What first began as a strategy by Bell Laboratories to recruit pre-trained college students who had hard to find UNIX skill sets, has blossomed into an alternative to the "cathedral" approach to software development. This movement gained momentum, particularly after development of Linux in the early 1990s, and use of the open source approach for production of high quality, innovative software has grown exponentially. Despite this impressive track record, and some notable exceptions, OSS has been generally avoided as a viable software alternative within the US federal government sector. The objections to OSS are based primarily upon two pivotal concerns: security and lack of support.

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Three college students build a health provider search site in six weeks

How Quantum Computing Will Change Cryptography

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The massive release of the US National Security Agency (NSA)s classified documents by Edward Snowden continues to raise questions about security. One of these documents deals with the NSAs classified research program in the exotic field of quantum computing.

Encryption picture from Shutterstock

This research investigates ways to process information using the laws of quantum mechanics, rather than the familiar physics underlying present-day computer processors.

Why should the NSA care? Because the single most famous application of quantum computing is in code-breaking.

During World War II, a team led by Alan Turing used a primitive computer to break the Nazis Enigma code

The NSA document, which can be found online, deals with the excitingly named project Penetrating Hard Targets.

An unknown portion of the $US80-million budget is devoted to building a small quantum processor, capable of counting up to four. (No, not four-million. Just four!) This doesnt sound like much, but one has to start somewhere.

Another portion supports research into quantum cryptography, which offers new, higher-security secret codes based on quantum mechanics.

The news here is that the NSA had its own secret experimental program. It was already public knowledge that the NSA is interested in quantum computing.

The NSA has been financially supporting non-classified quantum computing research at universities since the 1990s, and many academic journal articles acknowledge NSA support.

See more here:
How Quantum Computing Will Change Cryptography


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