Category Archives: Encryption
Research proposes ‘full-journey’ email encryption – The Stack
A group of researchers from Austin, NYU and Cornell universities have developed a scheme for genuine end-to-end email encryption though that term might need to be redefined in the context of their project.
Traditional end-to-end email encryption only provides security in transit between mail servers once on the servers themselves, the emails are processed as plain text, facilitating processes such as spam filters.
The group proposes a system called Pretzel, which develops a cryptographic algorithm that permits two parties to blindly contribute to encryption, and extends the concept to email.
However the researchers admit that providers will need to furnish additional computing resources in order to handle the encryption process.
The benefit of the scheme is the near-impossibility of interception/decryption from emails captured in transit. Gaining control of network nodes is a widespread practice on both sides of the law, with headlines in recent years going to official and malfeasant actors taking control of Tor exit nodes with a view to de-anonymising information.
In practice genuine end-to-end encryption has been available via PGP since the early 1990s, and the functionality is offered by certain of the larger providers notably those who are party to the decrypted emails at the client end, at which point the information can be monetised by targeted advertising.
But the researchers note that the limited availability of PGP has more commercial than governmental imperatives behind it:
A crucial reasonat least the one that is often citedis that encryption appears to be incompatible with value-added functions (such as spam filtering, email search, and predictive personal assistanceand with the functions by which free webmail providers monetize user data (for example, topic extraction)These functions are proprietary; for example, the provider might have invested in training a spam filtering model, and does not want to publicize it (even if a dedicated party can infer itSo it follows that the functions must execute on providers servers with access to plaintext emails.
Pretzels innovation is in following up email decryption (usually provided by public/private keys as in PGP) with a second protocol which operates between the email provider and each mail recipient, called secure two-party computation (2PC). 2PC schemes can process any function in a manner hidden from one or more of the concerned parties.
However the processing needs of full-scale 2PC systems would not be realistic as a transport mechanism, and so the researchers have produced a slimmed-down and more linear throughput, with certain algorithm functionality baked into the procedure.
At the moment the teams implementation of Pretzel permits core commercial operations such as email scanning (i.e. for advertising or spam-identification purposes), and a limited subset of other usual mail server functions. The researchers hope to add the ability to accommodate predictive personal assistance services and virus scanning in the future, as well as the ability to hide metadata some of the most fiercely-sought information among security services and hackers alike.
Ultimately, our goal is just to demonstrate an alternative. We dont claim that Pretzel is an optimal point in the three-way tradeoff among functionality, performance, and privacywe dont yet know what such an optimum would be. We simply claim that it is different from the status quo (which combines rich functionality, superb performance, but no encryption by default) and that it is potentially plausible.
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Research proposes 'full-journey' email encryption - The Stack
Encryption patent that roiled Newegg is dead on appeal | Ars Technica – Ars Technica
Enlarge / A figure from the patent that has been asserted against Intel, Google, and hundreds of other companies providing SSL and TLS on their websites.
Patent-holding company TQP Developmentmade millions claiming that itowned a breakthrough in Web encryption, even though most encryption experts had never heard of the companyuntil itstarted a massive campaign of lawsuits.Yesterday, thecompany's litigation campaign was brought to an end when a panel of appeals judges refused (PDF) togive TQP a second chance tocollect on a jury verdict against Newegg.
The TQPpatentwas invented by Michael Jones, whose company Telequip briefly sold a kind of encrypted modem. The companysold about 30 models before the modem business went bust. Famed patentenforcer Erich Spangenbergbought the TQP patent in 2008 and beganfiling lawsuits, saying that the Jones patent actually entitled him to royalties on a basic form of SSL Internet encryption. Spangenberg and Jonesultimately made more than $45 million from the patent.
TQP appealedits case, and oral arguments were heard at the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on February 8. Yesterday, thethree-judge panel found in Newegg's favor, issuing a short two-pageorder that did not explain its reasoning. While TQP could theoretically still appeal to the full Federal Circuit or to the Supreme Court, it's far from clear there's anylegal issue in the case that would compel either of those bodies to take the case.
Newegg and its former chief legal officer, Lee Cheng, have long taken an uncompromising view on the necessity offighting what they term "patent trolls" in court. The TQP Development trial, in which Cheng faced off against Spangenberg, may end up being Newegg's last high-profile patent trial. In October, Cheng left Newegg for Nashville-based guitar maker Gibson Brands.
The Newegg win did not invalidate theTQP patent, which expired in 2012. Nonew cases have been filed since2014.
After the trial against Newegg, the TQP patent was sold, according to former owner Spangenberg. The new entity's ownership is unclear, but it is still represented by the same lawyers from Los Angeles-based Russ, August and Kabat. TQP lead attorney Marc Fenster didn't respond to a request for comment on the appeals court ruling.
"Neweggs e-commerce encryption systems never infringed TQPs patent, which is directed to outdated modem technology from the 1980s," Newegg lawyer Dan Brean told Ars via e-mail. "The differences are clear and fundamental in terms of how and when data is encrypted and transmitted. That is why Judge Gilstrap entered judgment in Neweggs favor despite the jurys verdict, and the Federal Circuit has now affirmed that judgment."
"Im glad that this is finally over," added Newegg lawyer Kent Baldauf. "We have lived with this a long time as it was filed in 2011. This patent troll case was particularly troubling as it not only involved an antiquated technology that has never been used by modern Internet retailers such as Newegg, but it was also asserted to cover the foundational developments of luminaries in the field of encryption such as Ron Rivest and Whit Diffie.We are thankful that Newegg once again stood up to a patent troll and refused to settle based upon a patent that it did not infringe."
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Encryption patent that roiled Newegg is dead on appeal | Ars Technica - Ars Technica
Set up VMware VM Encryption for hypervisor-level security – TechTarget
The new VM Encryption tool in vSphere 6.5 goes beyond standard VM-level security by performing the encryption at...
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the hypervisor level.
Doing the encryption at the hypervisor level instead of in the virtual machine makes encryption agnostic, as well as policy-driven -- VMware VM Encryption is managed via storage policy. While the main purpose of the tool is to enhance security, it means encryption is no longer an all-or-nothing proposal; encryption of the storage area network or underlying storage are no longer the only options.
There is a small overhead for VM Encryption, though this is to be expected in any encryption system. For what it's worth, I hardly noticed the overhead during my experimentation with ESXi encryption.
Implementing VM Encryption is quite simple. You can easily set up a basic proof of concept (POC) implementation for the encryption infrastructure, as VMware has designed the underlying cryptographic system to use third-party plugins. VMware's current list of approved vendors includes RSA and Symantec, as well as several others. There is currently no VMware implementation.
Before implementing the encryption system, it's important to understand how VM Encryption works. Put simply, the encryption is handed from the encryption VM to its client, the vCenter.
Setting up the cryptographic back end is straightforward. Most vendors will ship a VM appliance that can be installed, powered on and configured. Since configuring the cryptography for each of the vendor plugins is beyond the scope of this guide, I simply used the modified POC encryption manager that VMware released to beta testers.
This test version only keeps encryption keys for the duration of the machine's uptime. This is just a demonstration system and the encryption key will be lost upon reboot, so don't encrypt any machines you actually use. The best way to avoid running into trouble is to create a couple of test VMs.
Before implementing the encryption system, it's important to understand how VM Encryption works. Put simply, the encryption is handed from the encryption VM to its client, the vCenter. The vCenter then provides keys as needed to the ESXi hosts. These are stored in a secure manner to enable you to unlock the VM. The keys are never written to the disk on the ESXi host. However, the intermediate keys for locking and unlocking the VMs are stored in a secure encryption enclave.
To set up the encryption server, you need to set up a Linux host with Docker. Once you've done this, pull down the Docker image and run the instance with the following command:
sudo docker pull lamw/vmwkmip
sudo docker run --rm -it -p 5696:5696 lamw/vmwkmip
At this point the Docker image should be running on port 5696.
Now that we've covered how encryption is applied, let's look at how to set up the infrastructure. First, add the Key Management Service (KMS) server to the vCenter by going to the top level of the vCenter configuration menu and selecting Key Management Servers from the hyperlink on the left.
This will bring up a dialog box that allows you to enter KMS server details. The exact details will vary, and some KMS server configurations may require a username and password. We don't need to use one in this instance. The server address should be that of the Ubuntu server. The port used for this example is 5696.
Once you've submitted the KMS details, you'll be prompted to accept a certificate; accept this, and KMS will be set to the default.
At this point, the cryptographic configuration is complete. However, a single KMS is a single point of failure, therefore, I recommend configuring a minimum of two. Do not encrypt the vCenter or it will prevent vCenter from booting. You need to avoid this because vCenter is a key component of the cryptographic infrastructure.
The next step is to create an encryption storage policy. If you navigate to VM Storage Policies, you'll see a new storage policy titled VM Encryption Policy. There are several options that you can modify if necessary.
At this point, you can encrypt the VM. It's best practice to only encrypt the disks; it's possible to encrypt other items, but it's unadvisable unless you have an overriding reason to do so.
From here on out, encrypting the VM is clear-cut. Before encrypting a device, you must first power it off. Navigate to the VM you plan on encrypting and right-click to edit its setting and expand the disks to encrypt. Select the VM Encryption Policy from the VM storage policy drop-down menu.
Disabling VM Encryption is as easy as changing the policy to the default data store policy. Again, you must power off the VM to perform the necessary actions.
There are a few caveats to using VM Encryption. For one, it does not support exporting encrypted VMs to open virtualization format. The use of cryptography on a per VM basis is dependent on the business and security requirements of the company in question. Exercise caution when implementing the encryption and make sure you fully understand and recognize the ramifications and functionality of encryption.
NSX leads the pack for VMware security
Explore ESXi hypervisor security features
What's next in the world of cryptography?
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Set up VMware VM Encryption for hypervisor-level security - TechTarget
How The Media Are Using Encryption Tools To Collect Anonymous Tips – NPR
The Washington Post and other media organizations have launched webpages outlining ways you can leak information to them confidentially. Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images hide caption
The Washington Post and other media organizations have launched webpages outlining ways you can leak information to them confidentially.
There was a time when a whistleblower had to rely on the Postal Service, or a pay phone, or an underground parking garage to leak to the press.
This is a different time.
A renewed interest in leaks since Donald Trump's surprise election victory last fall, and a growth in the use of end-to-end encryption technology, have led news organizations across the country to highlight the multiple high-tech ways you can now send them anonymous tips.
The Washington Post, The New York Times and ProPublica have launched webpages outlining all the ways you can leak to them. ProPublica highlights three high-tech options on its page (in addition to the Postal Service): the encrypted messaging app Signal, an encrypted email program called PGP (or GPG) and an anonymous file sharing system for desktop computers called SecureDrop. The Washington Post goes even further, highlighting six digital options.
Jeff Larson, a reporter at ProPublica, says of all this, "We're living in almost a golden age for leaks."
Some tools like SecureDrop, created by the Freedom of the Press Foundation, were made just for newsrooms to accept anonymous tips. Others, like Signal, the premier encrypted messaging app on the market right now, were created with a different, and more universal purpose.
Moxie Marlinspike, one of the creators of Signal, says it's for everyone who might not be aware that a lot of their communication might not actually be private.
"What we're really trying to do is bring people's existing reality in line with people's expectations," Marlinspike says. "Most of the time when people send someone a message, their assumption is that that message is only visible to themselves and the intended recipient. It's always disappointing when that turns out not to be true."
SecureDrop, created by the Freedom of the Press Foundation, was designed for newsrooms to accept anonymous tips. SecureDrop/Screenshot by NPR hide caption
Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, says newsrooms' and leakers' reliance on these tools also speaks to a new reality.
"We're living in a golden age of leaks but we're also living in a golden age of surveillance," Timm says. "It is very easy for the government, for example, to subpoena a Google, or a Verizon, or an AT&T to get a journalist's phone records, or email records, that tells them who they talked to, when they talked to them, and for how long. Over the past eight or 10 years, the government has been able to prosecute a record number of sources, and the primary way they've been able to do this is because of their increased surveillance capabilities."
That heavier scrutiny of the press and its sources has come from both sides of the aisle. This month, President Trump directed the Justice Department to investigate what he calls "criminal leaks" coming from the federal government, and in a speech Friday at the Conservative Political Action Conference, he said journalists should not be allowed to use unnamed sources.
The Obama administration used the Espionage Act multiple times to prosecute leaks (more than any other administration, according to PolitiFact), as well as secretly seizing Associated Press reporters' phone records.
While many encryption apps are used to bypass such surveillance of communications between leakers and the press, some apps are being used by staffers within the government to communicate with each other. A recent Washington Post article stated that some White House staffers are relying on an encrypted messaging app called Confide to communicate with each other without using official phones or email, out of a fear of leaks.
But using an app like that to make official White House communications private raises red flags for Chris Lu, former deputy labor secretary under President Barack Obama.
"At the White House and at the Department of Labor," Lu says, "we were given very clear training and guidance about the Presidential Records Acts and maintaining documents." The Washington Post story, he says, "instantly raised red flags whether it was in compliance with the Presidential Records Act. And it clearly is not." (That law is meant to ensure that communications in the White House are maintained for historical purposes.)
Confide CEO Jon Brod says his company advises all users to follow the rules of their employers, if they're using Confide to talk to co-workers.
"There are certain industries and sectors where specific people and certain types of conversations are regulated," Brod says, pointing to financial services, health care and parts of the government. "If you are in one of those industries or sectors, it's important that you use Confide in a way that conforms to any of those regulations that may be relevant to you."
Of course, the legality and ethics of such communications between government workers, as well as between the press and government leakers, often depends on whom you ask.
For Moxie Marlinspike of Signal, there is no question on one thing: whether apps such as his are good for society. "I think what we're seeing is things like Signal almost democratizing that ability (to leak)," he says. "So people who are not necessarily at these high-level posts, but just ordinary workers, are able to communicate what's going on to people outside of government. If you're the director of the CIA, you don't need Signal."
But with the growth of apps like Signal and encryption technology, there might not ever be a way to tell just how ubiquitous all this high-tech leaking becomes. Often the data is so secret that there are few metrics to read, if there are any at all. "We don't have any information about our users," Marlinspike says. "That's how end-to-end encryption works: Even us, we don't have that kind of information."
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How The Media Are Using Encryption Tools To Collect Anonymous Tips - NPR
How Encryption Makes Your Sensitive Cloud-Based Data an Asset, Not a Liability – Security Intelligence (blog)
Organizations are adopting encryption at a rapid and increasingly urgent pace. Why? Because encryption helps organizations support dynamic industry regulations while also protecting sensitive data thats placed in the cloud.
The trend of adopting public cloud solutions continues to grow, but protecting critical data in the cloud is still a major concern. Its critical to protect data against external breaches and unauthorized access by cloud service providers. Collectively, organizations are diligently working with consultants and suppliers to implement solutions to keep their data safe.
In many specific instances, companies want to prevent their data from being accessible to cloud service providers (CSPs). However, organizations are now facing a new dilemma: What are they supposed to do when they want to permanently delete their data in the cloud?
Regulatory compliance and cloud data protection are two driving reasons for establishing encryption and encryption key management strategies. Furthermore, in the new world of cloud data security, the old concept of a castle has become ineffective; the concept of a curated museum is much more applicable to cloud data security. In this new world, organizations want to share data appropriately with many users and platforms without running the risk that it will be taken, changed, hijacked, destroyed or accessed by unauthorized users.
Learn more about Multi-Cloud Data Encryption
To complicate matters, the value of data can change quickly. As we know, information such as quarterly financial data has high value prior to its disclosure, but the necessity to keep it private significantly declines once the announcement of financial performance is released to the market. However, other data, such as pharmaceutical trial data, HR information from divested organizations and historical notes on litigation proceedings, can quickly become a liability if it is unintentionally disclosed to the wrong party after the collective work on these efforts has been completed.
When you combine the need for privacy, the desire to collaborate using shared data and the trend of leveraging cloud applications and storage, you can see the need to not only protect cloud-based data, but also to manage it throughout its entire life cycle, from creation to destruction. Furthermore, in the case of cloud deployments, this process needs to be managed and controlled in an environment that is not physically under your control. This last requirement raises the following questions:
Encryption has historically been used to protect data against unauthorized use. However, encryption can effectively erase data as well. This is called cryptographic erasure.
The National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) released Special Publication 800-88, Revision 1: Guidelines for Media Sanitization, which detailed how encryption is part of media and data sanitation.
If strong cryptography is used, the publication stated, sanitization of the target data is reduced to sanitization of the encryption key(s) used to encrypt the target data. In laymens terms, this means that if the data is encrypted and you destroy the keys, the data is erased.
Of course, there are some qualifiers to claiming sanitization by cryptographic erasure. First, you must ensure that you have encrypted the data from the moment it was originally stored. Next, verify that you have exclusive access to all data encryption keys and ensure that all keys are wrapped under one or more wrapping keys. Finally, delete the wrapping keys to render the data encryption keys and data itself unrecoverable. Fortunately, these steps are not difficult to follow if you have the right tools.
For example, if you have a petabyte of data that has been encrypted from the moment it was placed in the cloud and control over the wrapping keys that protect the data encryption keys, then when you delete the wrapping keys, you render data encryption keys and the petabyte of data useless. This happens regardless of where the data is stored or whether you can even access the storage environment. In other words, you can effectively erase a petabyte of data by deleting just a few kilobytes of keys. Thats cryptographic erasure, and its powerful.
Naturally, you may want to recover the petabytes of bits associated with your now-useless data. Why pay to store petabytes of random bits? However, that is secondary to the erasure of the data itself.
The logistics of implementing cryptographic erasure fundamentally requires the system that stores and encrypts the data to be separate from that of encryption key management. Leveraging key life cycle management software packages helps maintain separation of these duties and functions.
Keeping your encryption engine separate from the encryption keys, as well as keeping the keys well-managed, is not just a best practice, but also keeps you on the right side of regulations and helps protect your most precious assets your encryption keys and encrypted data from threat actors. Remember that storage is inexpensive, but data is becoming infinitely more valuable, both as an asset and a liability. Control your data, protect it and ensure that it has a clear life cycle that you control.
The future architecture of data protection is clearly modular. We need to:
Following these practices ensures that your data, protected through encryption, will provide value through its lifetime and can be securely deleted when no longer valuable.
To protect data in a multicloud environment, organizations should still focus on implementing centralized policy management as well as centralized key management.
Guardium for Multi-Cloud Data Encryption offers the ability to encrypt cloud data across multiple clouds. It also integrates with IBM Security Key Lifecycle Manager. This combination of local but highly redundant key management, and the ability to concurrently manage tens of thousands of encrypted file systems or volumes in multiple clouds, gives organization the tools they need to protect and manage the entire life cycle of data regardless of where it resides.
Learn more about Multi-Cloud Data Encryption
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Decipher your Encryption Challenges – Infosecurity Magazine
Every company I speak with is throwing the kitchen sink at protecting their network from external attackers, data breaches and mobile device loss. At the heart is the fundamental point that we all must accept: that where once corporate data sat ring-fenced on a server, it is now dispersed geographically, across many different devices, and moving all the time.
As IT and security professionals we keep battling with the need to keep the drawbridge down, but stop the baddies getting in, and ensure soldiers (data) outside the castle walls are safe.
Encryption has played a key role in protecting data for a long time. Thousands of years before the computer appeared there were Hebrew mono-alphabetic substitutions, and of course the use by the Romans of ciphers, being just a couple of examples. Yet despite its clear benefits in protecting against prying eyes, for a long time it fell out of favor.
Certainly, in early computing it was a complete pain to work with, and some might use stronger language than that! Whilst vendors eventually got their heads around making it more usable, the world moved on, and the problem is no longer simply about protecting data at point A.
Precisely because of the problems we laid out earlier the need to manage encryption across devices, locations and users have become an IT imperative. Any security professional knows that complexity leads to risk, and that spells danger for the enterprise. Not just from invaders, but risks of regulatory non-compliance, accidental data breaches, or simply the loss of a smartphone.
The challenge therefore has become to simplify the security landscape in the organization, without compromising on protection. In the case of encryption, this means being able to manage encryption across on-premise, cloud, hybrid-cloud and a myriad of devices, as well when it is with users who may not belong to your company.
Centralized encryption management solves the problem by ensuring keys are controlled from one point, and more importantly the keys themselves are stored outside the organization: after all there is no point locking your data in a box, but leaving the key in the lock!
This alone is not enough in the modern enterprise, you need to be able to manage that same encryption across cloud services, virtual machines and resources that you do not own. Its important to ensure that when you look at choosing an encryption provider that you consider this reality, otherwise you leave yourself greatly exposed.
Encryption is here to stay, it is the last line of defense when a breach occurs, whatever action caused it, invader or accident. With so much at stake for a business in terms of reputation damage, regulatory fines, and ultimately the bottom line, centralized encryption management is the route to bringing clarity to effective encryption. Remember, nobody ever got fired for implementing encryption, but they probably did for mismanaging it.
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How the Politics of Encryption Affects Government Adoption – Freedom to Tinker
I wrote yesterday about reports thatpeople in the White House are using encrypted communication apps more often, and why that might be. Today I want to follow up by talking about how the politics of encryption might affect government agencies choices about how to secure their information. Ill do this by telling the stories of the CIOs of three hypothetical Federal agencies.
Alice is CIO of Agency A. Her agencys leader has said in speechesthat encryption is a tool of criminals andterrorists, andthat encryption is used mostly to hide bad or embarrassing acts. Alice knows that if she adopts encryption for the agency, her boss could face criticism for hypocrisy, for using the very technology that he criticizes. Even if there is evidence thatencryption will make Agency Amore secure, there is a natural tendency for Alice tolook for other places to try to improve security instead.
Bob is CIO of Agency B. His agencysleader has taken a more balanced view, painting encryption as a tool with broad value forhonest people, and which happens to be used by bad people as well. Bob willbe in a better position than Alice to adopt encryption if hethinks it will improve his agencys security. But he might hesitate a bit to do so if Agencies A and B need to work together on other issues, or if the two agency heads are friendsespecially if encryption seems more important to the head of Agency A than it does to the head of Bobs own agency.
Charlie is CIO of Agency C. His agencys leader hasnt taken a public position on encryption, but the leader is known to be impulsive, thin-skinned, and resistant to advice from domain experts. Charlie worries that if he starts deploying encryption in his agency, and then the leader impulsivelytakes a strong position against encryption without consulting his team, the resulting accusationsof hypocrisy could anger the leader. That might cost Charlie his job, or seriously undermine the authority he needsto properly manageagency IT. The safe thing for Charlie to do is to avoid deploying encryptionnot only to preserve his job but also to protect the rest of the agencys IT agenda. If Charlie doesnt change the agencys practice, then criticism of the practice can be deflected onto the previous leaderand of course well be upgradingto the better practicesoon. Here the uncertainty created by the leaders management style deters Charlie from changing encryption practice.
Lets recap. Alice, Bob, and Charlie are operating in different environments, but in all three cases, the politics of encryption are deterring them, at least a little, from deploying encryption. Their decision to deploy it or not will depend not only on their best judgment as to whether it will improve the agencys security, but also on political factors that raise the cost of adopting encryption. And so their agencies may not make enough use of encryption.
This is yet another reason we need a serious and specific discussion about encryption policy.
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How the Politics of Encryption Affects Government Adoption - Freedom to Tinker
Gmail v7.2 Prepares to Add Support for S/MIME Enhanced Encryption – XDA Developers (blog)
XDA Developers (blog) | Gmail v7.2 Prepares to Add Support for S/MIME Enhanced Encryption XDA Developers (blog) For a while, users of the Android app could only send messages over the default TLS encryption (enabled by default), but in version 7.2 of the Gmail application, it appears that support for sending messages with this enhanced S/MIME encryption may soon ... |
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Gmail v7.2 Prepares to Add Support for S/MIME Enhanced Encryption - XDA Developers (blog)
Your Guide to the Encryption Debate – Consumer Reports – ConsumerReports.org
Encryption could soon become part of national debates over consumer issues ranging from data breaches to the safety of connected cars.
Not long ago, it was the sort of thing that only bankers, spies, and military leaders worried about. But, in today's digital world, encryption has become part of our everyday lives, protecting our ability to shop online, book flights, and hold private conversations.
According to Mozilla, the open-internet advocacy group that created the Firefox browser, 49.5 percent of global web traffic is now encryptedan increase of more than 10 percent in one year.
While security experts applaud that progress, they'd like to see even more encryption, to cut down on data breaches, identity theft, and the sort of hacks that could perhaps threaten the nation's power plants.
But not everyone views encryption as a force for good. For law enforcement officials, it's also a tool that allows thieves and terrorists to escape detection.
With a new administration in the White House, one vocal about fighting crime and stamping out terrorism, the debate over encryption's merits may soon surface once again.
Encryption may be central to many everyday transactions, but the issues can be tough to follow. Heres your cheat sheet.
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Your Guide to the Encryption Debate - Consumer Reports - ConsumerReports.org
Top 6 Data Encryption Solutions – The Merkle
People who take computer security seriously will acknowledge they need to encrypt data and create regular backups. Luckily, there are quite a few solutions that allowfor both things at the same time. Below is a brief list of tools specializing in data encryption. Do keep in mind this list is not complete, but merely serves as an indicator asto what one should look for in such a software solution.
Encrypting computer data and protecting the device in question can all be achieved by using the Digital Guardian software kit. Keeping sensitive information safe from harm is thenumber one priority. Moreover, the toolkit focuses on data activity and enforcing user policies. This is a quite powerful solution for both consumers and enterprises, albeit it is more tailored towards the latter.
Kryptel is one of the many consumer-oriented encryption tools that provides a lot of convenience. In a matter of a few clicks, users can easily encrypt thousands of files on their personal computer. Data-wiping security can be enabled as well, which may be a nifty feature for some users. The free tool offers all of this functionality, whereas the paid version adds a command-line interface and encrypted backups.
Open-source solutions in the way of data encryption are not hard to come by, yet few of them make a big name for themselves. Ciphershed is one of those rare exceptions, which is completely free of charge to use. It is capable of encrypting files and entire drives, as well as removable storage. It includes a wizard guiding both novice and advanced users through this entire process, which is appreciated by a lot of people. It is a very potent solution that will suit most peoples needs.
Three different versions of SecureDoc exist in the world today, one of which is designed specifically for the Windows operating system. SecureDoc offers encryption tools for computers, laptops, and removable media. Users can encrypt files, folders, and entire disks in a matter of clicks. The companys other two solutions focus on the Enterprise and Cloud sector, which are worth checking out as well.
Another open-source program available to consumers around the world goes by the name of AES Crypt. With a 256-bit encryption algorithm, AES Crypt is one of the most powerful free solutions to date. Encrypting data requires a file name and password, which is also used for decrypting information later on. AES Crypt works across Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X devices, AES Crypt has become somewhat of a standard among computer users over the past few years.
Last but not least, there is the VeraCrypt open-source encryption solution. Its main purpose is to protect files and computer systems against data theft and information leaks, both of which are very common threats these days. VeraCrypt can be used to encrypt hard drive partitions, as well as the entire system. Moreover, it is a powerful brute-force attack solution, which can go a long way in this day and age of cyber crime.
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