Privacy core to ID success, ICO warns
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Shouldn't be added as an afterthought Government needs to make privacy and data protection principles a core component of its IT specifications, according to the assistant information commissioner.â¦
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Scrambling for safety California is on the brink of introducing privacy laws to safeguard personal data stored on radio frequency identification (RFID) tags in government-issued documents and identification cards.â¦
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(Source: Oracle) John Laughhunn, CTO of A.T. Kearney, and Amin Negandhi, CEO of Echelon Consulting, explain how A.T. Kearney consultants worldwide can securely search for information across multiple applications using IC Tracker, an internal knowledgebase. In this engaging 30 minute session, they discuss the requirements, selection process, implementation and roll-out of their system, and how it has enabled secure access to intellectual property to become a competitive differentiator.
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What exactly does the law mean by "data quality," and what does it have to do with privacy?
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Across the security industry, experts are encouraging businesses to abandon piecemeal IT systems and data-defense efforts in favor of overarching risk management strategies.According to some customers, consultants, and vendors, the strategy is starting to prove particularly helpful in addressing issues of identity management and access control.Long identified by industry analysts as an area where businesses often end up "chasing rainbows" and getting involved in never-ending projects, experts contend that by adopting a risk-based model to drive identity management, customers' goals are actually being realized."When developing our architecture, it became very clear that one of the processes that was important to tackle before starting to change things in one region or business unit was to do risk assessment and integrate all the subjects related to access control," said Paulo Martins, enterprise identity and access manager at financial services giant ABN AMRO.In 2006, the banking company made a decision to rework its identity infrastructure as part of an effort to make access control an even more central focus of its enterprise security strategy.Rather than simply looking for a new technology to improve its standing, ABN AMRO found that by getting a fix on the areas of its business where controlling access to sensitive data was most crucial -- and then assessing the varying levels of efficacy within its existing operations -- it found a way to move its project forward faster and with a greater sense of direction."As companies get larger and the numbers of applications increase, and they grow through mergers and acquisitions, they find that they have different levels of maturity related to identity and access," said Martins. "We built our strategy considering all of these things. The first year was dedicated to process and access control reviews; the second year involved implementation of those processes and use of risk analysis for critical applications."Among the most valuable topics that ABN AMRO was led to consider as part of its process, he said, was where it made sense to automate identity-based control for its applications and where it did not.By gauging the number of users and criticality of the data involved in each area of its business, the company was able to set its priorities and get controls in place where the risk of information loss was most widespread or severe, said Martins.Using risk management to prioritize security As part of its project, ABN AMRO brought in consultants from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) to help map out its areas of need and define where its greatest data and identity risks lay.Jerry Lewis, a principal and national identity management leader at PwC, said that his company is advising more customers to tackle their projects using a risk management strategy because it allows them to refine their plans and improve their security standing with greater alacrity."We're definitely seeing risk management becoming the next real extension of identity management," Lewis said. "Most large companies we see have spent a lot of time and money putting solutions into place to drive various requirements -- such as in addressing compliance regulations -- and once they have the infrastructure installed, they realize that they need to use more of a risk-based approach."Lewis said that more customers than ever are starting to adopt the risk-based identity management approach to get a better fix on handling applications and systems access from an enterprise-wide manner.Those companies' immediate goals tend to revolve around their desire to improve identity management reporting capabilities, and to create dashboards that garner metrics related to potential compliance audits, he said."People are looking at this issue from more of a broad perspective, based on regulatory drivers, and focused on very specific applications or needs," Lewis said."Doing so, these companies are able to take a step back and find out what they really need to address first," he said. "They want the company-wide view, but they're also realizing that they typically can't have a complete end-to-end solution across the organization that is one size fits all and that they need use this risk-based approach."As a result of the success that companies are having using the strategy, the consultant said that more customers have earmarked funds to buy products that apply the risk-based approach to identity during 2008.One of the vendors PwC works with in the space, and the software provider to ABN AMRO, is SailPoint, a startup founded in 2005 whose products are focused squarely on identity auditing and analytics as well as policy enforcement and the creation of automated controls.SailPoint executives said that customers are looking for a new generation of identity management tools that address the issues that will help them pass audits and give them more of a top-down view into where their organizations stand in terms of securing access."People began getting pressured to address issues of compliance and audit around Sarbanes-Oxley, but traditional identity tools were not designed to solve those problems, they were mostly about improving operational efficiency, and people have been stretching those technologies to do things they weren't designed to do," said Mark McClain, chief executive and founder of SailPoint."Most of these systems were initially designed to set up accounts and do password resets, but with compliance needs, it has to become more about governance and risk assessment," he said. "Customers are frustrated because they've spent all this money dealing with the terms of the regulatory audits, yet the breaches have continued because they haven't been able to address the real risks."
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IP addresses, a string of numbers that identifies a computer, should generally be regarded as personal information, the head of the European Union's group of data privacy regulators said Monday.
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Researchers are developing an RFID-enabled watch system to help the memory-challenged find their stuff. But making sure it doesn't track too much is a big privacy concern. By Michael Bradbury.
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(InfoWorld) - Oracle has released a technology and policy blueprint for how organizations can exchange sensitive identity information among applications. Oracle has given theÂ Identity Governance FrameworkÂ (IGF) to the Liberty Alliance, a consortium that develops standards for Web-services applications, said Brett McDowell, Liberty's executive director. It was developed with support from vendors such as CA, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, and Novell. The IGF will be used to develop technical standards for how identity information is stored and shared across systems. Over the coming months, Liberty will gather more technical requirements from users, McDowell said. "In the big picture, this helps enterprises better manage the privacy of identity information," McDowell said. "The key is that this is one more layer in completing the overall framework for identity management." Around June, a Liberty technical group will test the specifications before the final phase,Â interoperability testing, he said. Oracle made the IGF available to Liberty royalty-free so it can be used without licensing barriers in a wider range of products, McDowell said. The IGF includes components such as: -- Client Attribute Requirement Markup Language (CARML) and schema: an XML-based contract defined by application developers that informs deployment managers and service providers about the usage requirements of an application. -- Attribute Authority Policy Markup Language (AAPML): a set of policy rules regarding the use of identity-related information that allow sources to specify constraints on use of data. -- CARML API: an application programming interface that makes it easier for developers to write applications that consume and use identity-related data in a way that conforms to policies.
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The site tweaks a privacy setting that had revealed personal information from private profiles after a Wired News inquiry, and explains its philosophy on users' privacy. Threat Level talks with chief privacy officer, Chris Kelly.
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(InfoWorld) - The companies that are having the most success in advancing their data security efforts today are those that are finding a way to protect sensitive information without getting in the way of business users, industry experts maintain. In crafting their data-handling policies and selecting from the multitude of security technologies at their fingertips, those businesses that can foster both ready access to information, along with strong defenses for end-users and IT systems, are making progress the fastest, claim leading vendors and service providers. After years of "throwing technologies" at the data security problem while juggling complex business demands along with external threats and regulatory compliance audits, some businesses are finally discovering that they can simplify the entire process by taking a more comprehensive approach to tailoring their programs to the manner in which their users access, handle, and share information. Even within IT giants like IBM, the struggle to balance security issues with emerging business demands to work with information in new ways hasn't always been approached in this manner, said Julie Donahue, vice president of the security and privacy service in the company's Global Technology Services group. Only through experience and ongoing efforts to constantly rationalize security policies with business demands has the massive firm been able to get a grip on its own data-handling needs, she said. "Customers need to step back and see what their own culture wants. If we locked down everything within IBM, it would be so difficult to manage that we would have a serious management problem, so you have to ask questions around culture before you begin thinking of enforcement," said Donahue. "You have to assess the risk environment and think of this as a holistic problem in terms of how you place bets and need to manage pools of risk, even though that for most CIOs it often feels like you have to spend your time going day-to-day dealing with the crisis of the moment," she said. "You really need to look at where to make the right investments, where to do enforcement, and where to monitor to have a truly strategic view." Donahue said that when IBM was building its security practice roughly 16 months ago, it found that customers were spending as much as 10 percent of their IT budgets dealing with the maintenance and complexity of their data security systems. The only way to reduce the data security management headache is to design an internal framework for managing infrastructure to ensure that investments are being made wisely, she said. In many cases, those companies that are succeeding in that regard are treating their data assets just as they would treat cold, hard cash, the expert maintains. "Companies need to protect their vast ecosystem of data like it is a monetary system, they really have to think about it that way," said Donahue. "It can't be the data center's problem or the network administrator's responsibility alone to protect its security; it has to be everyone's responsibility throughout the entire company." IBM learns about security leaks the hard way As evidence of the types of things that can happen to undermine even a comprehensive security game plan, Donahue pointed to IBM's loss of two backup tapes that contained sensitive information about former employees earlier this year. While the incident was actually related to IBM's provider of backup storage services, the company was forced to pay out roughly $22 million in remediation costs related to informing those people who had been affected and providing credit monitoring services and the like for those individuals, she said. In that sense, companies must also require the highest security standards from their business partners, said the expert. IBM has since written stronger backup-tape handling policies into its contract with its partner as a result of the incident, and Donahue encouraged others to do the same. Phillip Dunkelberger, chief executive at encryption software specialists PGP, said that companies are spending too much time trying to react to data incidents and the individual mandates of compliance regulations while overlooking opportunities to improve data security through smarter process control. Many companies are still too concerned with protecting various endpoint devices and network assets when a more data-driven approach would save them both time and money, he said. "It has to be about the data. Data is very much the currency that people are transacting with, and employees need to be able to get their jobs done, even if that means taking information outside the network," said Dunkelberger. "As complexity grows, things happen -- executives buy iPhones that are essentially 60GB storage devices that run on Open BSD and allow third-party applications," he said. "Defending the device is going to be a losing war, and even if you try to do that, people will inevitably add to the device or change its configuration." While it unsurprising that Dunkelberger advocates the use of encryption as an intelligent way to overcome the complexity of changing IT infrastructure and business demands of defending data, he said that problems are most often related to faulty policies, not the types of technologies used for information protection. The heightened information security atmosphere of today isn't as much a result of the rapid growth of mobile computing or shared infrastructure between companies, but rather an issue of poor data architecture from the top down, he said. "Unless we start having a comprehensive discussion about the defense of data, the problem will only continue to persist, and not just in relation to hackers or compliance," Dunkelberger said. "Everyone has policies, but it is interesting how much intellectual property is being targeted and stolen despite that; more of these attacks are coming, and that will only increase costs and complexity if handled improperly because these are the crown jewels of the organizations that are being targeted," he said.
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Someday, encryption features built into a wide range of IT products -- from operating systems and messaging gateways to hard drives and storage systems -- may work in concert to offer central policy enforcement across different types of network assets and devices.Until that day arrives, however, companies embracing the tools have become dependent on standalone encryption platforms to give them distributed control and policy enforcement across their IT systems.Long known as much for their complexity and demand for hands-on care and feeding as they have been valued for their protective qualities, encryption platforms are finally finding their way into a number of large businesses.This growth in adoption has been driven by the proliferation of data protection regulations and based on the availability of products that address the hardest elements of encryption technology -- policy enforcement and key management, industry watchers contend."The performing of the encryption itself is something that generally belongs close to whatever type of data you are trying to encrypt, whether that is e-mail, network traffic, or a database, but companies are buying into technologies today that allow them to do centralized policy enforcement and key management," said Paul Stamp, analyst with Forrester Research."It's great in theory to say that all of this activity needs to happen in the infrastructure components themselves," he said. "But that's not a reality yet in terms of allowing for centralized management, so customers are turning to these platforms in the meantime."End-users agree that encryption has long been a security process they desired to implement but couldn't stomach based on issues of complexity.The arrival of more usable encryption technology over the last few years has helped eliminate some of the traditional roadblocks, according to some corporate users."From my previous experience with e-mail encryption, I had two major concerns with using the tools: Key management and any dependence on the end-user to make the systems work right," said Michael Gabriel, corporate information security officer for Career Education Corporation (CEC) a higher-education provider that operates more than 75 colleges, schools, and universities."I haven't ever seen an encryption project where management wasn't a major sticking point, that has been the history of the technology, but it seems that the vendors are finally getting it right," Gabriel said. "Compared to mapping the business process, putting the technology in place was a breeze. The only real sticking point was getting the data flow."CEC is using encryption tools made by PGP in cooperation with its data leakage prevention and e-mail filtering systems to protect sensitive information being passed among its employees.Gabriel said that PGP's embedded key management capabilities may be the most valuable aspect of the system -- a feature that simply didn't exist in the past.Other PGP users echoed those sentiments, saying that encryption tools have advanced significantly over the past several years in terms of eliminating the management headaches that have made it challenging to deploy the systems on a wider basis.At American National Insurance Company, IT leaders said that the financial services company had been considering broader use of encryption for several years before the combination of more streamlined technologies and increasing pressure in the form of compliance regulations encouraged the firm to dive in.Today, the company is using PGP tools to both obscure sensitive e-mails and provide whole disk encryption to protect data stored on its desktop and laptop computers."We'd been looking at encryption closely since at least 2005, driven largely by the laws and compliance regulations that were being passed; we needed better e-mail security because we realized after sampling that we had a problem, and knew that we wanted to better protect sensitive information on our computers," said Ken Juneau assistant vice president of Information Technology Services at ANICO."The e-mail product simply sits in the mail flow, and any outbound messages that need to be get encrypted," he said. "Key management was simply the biggest differentiator. The system has almost no overhead in terms of administration; if a key needs to be created, the system handles it, and most end-users never know that the e-mail is being encrypted, which is ideal."With the PGP whole-disk encryption system ANICO is using, Juneau said that key management and the ability to automatically create end-user credential recovery tokens have also proven as easy to use as the insurance company had hoped.Inside smaller organizations, the ability to find encryption platforms that allow for simplified installation and management has been even more acute as the realities of smaller IT staffs make it even harder to deal with any widespread usability issues, experts said.Jason Parks, information systems analyst for Northern California's Butte County Department of Information Systems, said that deploying encryption several years ago was not an option for the government body before it found tools made by vendor Voltage Security that adequately address those issues."The tools have gotten a lot better, which allowed us to move forward with our plans," Parks said."We didn't want to do a bunch of certificate management, and we wanted an easy end-user experience as well. Using the system we have in place, we don't have to give a lot of complex instructions to the users," he said. "We have a limited amount of full-time IT staff in the county, so we couldn't do this until we found something that addressed all the traditional issues with encryption management."Over the course of the two years that Butte County has been working with Voltage's e-mail encryption platform, the IT specialist said that the product has become even more refined and less intrusive to end-users."It's great to see that the encryption vendors are making progress," said Parks. "Encryption is something that a lot of smaller organizations like us need that was not a realistic proposition in the not-too-distant past."Even the vendors themselves admit that encryption tools have changed dramatically in the last several years, allowing end-users to benefit from the protection that the technology can provide without creating massive headaches related to installation and maintenance."We've been trying hard as an industry to find ways to make encryption work better for customers. The issues with this technology have never been related to the level of protection but are more about cost and complexity of the tools," said David Thompson, director of product management at Voltage. "We're trying to change the cost and usability model, and it seems like the time has come when encryption has truly become more feasible for larger numbers of organizations."Phillip Dunkelberger, chief executive of PGP, said that the key to the encryption industry's continued growth and success will be based on its ability to create tools that allow organizations to protect their data without getting in the way of end-users simply trying to do their jobs.The ability for companies like PGP to continue to make their systems easier to use and maintain will lie at the heart of that progress, he said."IT operations are being asked to do more with less. They have smaller budgets for new technologies, greater needs to use information for issues of competitive advantage, and yet they're dealing with huge issues of risks and security threats," Dunkelberger said."The security industry has done itself a disservice by selling [fear, uncertainty and doubt], but we're much better served by looking harder at trying to help lower the cost of ownership and management for these products that address data protection," he said. "How we can do this without adding complexity will be the key to our growth in the future."
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Individual privacy is under threat around the world as governments continue introducing surveillance and information-gathering measures, according to an international rights group.
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In some instances, this privacy software may tell you that you're protected when you aren't.
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A new standard aims to help users pass information between Web services without sharing full access to their identities.
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Google is proposing that governments and technology companies create a transnational privacy policy.
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Facial and fingerprint data will be stored on an embedded chip.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft will participate in a meeting later this month with vendors and organizations that are backing several different identity management systems, an indication thatÂ cooperation between the software giant and its peersÂ is improving. The meeting, part of an initiative called the Concordia Project, strives to improve interoperability between Microsoft's CardSpace and OpenID, two identity management systems, and protocols for identity management supported by an industry trade group, the Liberty Alliance, said Roger Sullivan, president of its management board. Vendors will hear from companies such as General Motors, Boeing, and AOL about how they're trying to integrate various identity management systems into their operations, Sullivan said. "Many of these protocols today are very geek-centric," said Sullivan, who is also vice president of Oracle's identity management section. "They're not very people-friendy." A major issue is how vendors can use different authentication mechanisms in their operations. For example, a financial planning Web site could allow users to forecast how much their retirement fund may be worth in 30 years. Eventually, the user may want to buy a service from the financial planner and migrate that same data to an environment that uses stronger authentication, Sullivan said. This means there would need to be more interoperability between the protocols used by OpenID, CardSpace, and Liberty-enabled applications. "I would more expect that we will have nuanced changes or extensions to existing protocols to enable the interoperability," Sullivan said. The Concordia Project, set up by the Liberty Alliance, hopes to release its first set of open standards by the end of the year, Sullivan said Microsoft said in February at the RSA Conference it wouldÂ integrate CardSpace and OpenID, an open-source standard for logging into Web sites. The work would help mitigate potential security risks, such as so-called "man-in-the-middle" attacks, where a hacker can intercept identity information as it's in transit to a Web site, officials said. NovellÂ is also working with Microsoft on InfoCard Selector, a so-called "digital wallet" for handling identity information. Microsoft's commitment to the Concordia project shows it has realized the importance of interoperability, said Graham Titterington, principal analyst at Ovum. "Microsoft has already come a long way in terms of 12 months ago," Titterington said. "It's not a surprising development as a year ago I think it would have been." The meeting will take place on June 26 at Catalyst 2007, an enterprise IT conference in San Francisco. Â