Researcher: RSA 1024-bit Encryption not Enough
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Distributed computing experiment conducted over the course of 11 months points to a need for stronger encryption in the next five to ten years.
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A few of my previous columns discussed my vision of creating a more secure Internet. It involved replacing the Internet's default anonymity with pervasive authentication, from the hardware initialization, through the OS and all applications, the user, and ending with a verifiable network stream. It is my strong belief that without a complete overhaul of default authentication, malicious hacking is going to continue indefinitely.
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(Source: Credant)  New technology to meet security, operations, and compliance needs Security has evolved beyond merely encrypting "bits on disks". The paradigm must shift from Full Disk Encryption to Full Data Encryption to protect against insider threats and avoid significant manageability and usability issues.
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It must say something about our times that Bruce Schneier, a geeky computer encryption expert turned all-purpose security guru, occasionally gets recognized in public. "My life is just plain surreal," he says.
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VeriSign and RSA Security intro security tools that could help combat the upswing in E-commerce threats. By Thomas Claburn. It&#39;s hard to say what&#39;s growing faster, security threats or security solutions.
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A security expert has found programming errors in Oracle 11g that left security vulnerabilities.
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Thinks big RSA Verisign will spend $1bn during the next three years beefing up its internet infrastructure following this week's high-profile root server attack.â¦
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InfoWorld - A hacker claims to have discovered a cryptographic key that can be used to circumvent copy restrictions on HD DVD and Blu-ray movies.
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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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Unpatched vulnerabilities may leave computers open to remote attacks.
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More than half of the [&lt;a href="http://www.networkworld.com/topics/wireless.html"&gt;wireless&lt;/a&gt;] LAN devices being used at this week's RSA Conference on information security are themselves unsecured.
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Businesses must provide a secure environment for their customers and partners, Symantec CEO John Thompson tells RSA crowd.
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In 1980, I signed a deal with a company to market a product I was developing. The contract required me to turn over the source code, which I did. One day I went to a meeting at the office of the company, and there on the product manager's desk, right next to a door that opened to the outside, was a floppy labeled "Dave Winer's source code" in big letters.  If you own a Mac you may soon find out what that felt like. It's amazing to me that the tech blogosphere doesn't treat Apple's policy re broken hard disks as the huge gaping security hole that it is.  Think about it. We worry about bad people getting their hands on little pieces of data that, when added together, give them the power to be you in banking and credit transactions.  Think about what you would do if your laptop was stolen. Well, if you own a Mac and its hard disk goes bad, and you make the mistake of bringing it to Apple for service, you will turn over all that data to Apple. Not "may" or "might" but "will." What Apple in turn does with that data is none of your affair. They don't sign anything or offer any guarantees that they won't sell the disk to a data miner. Think it can't happen or that it's unlikely? I don't gain much comfort from your feeling of security. I've been writing about this issue since December 22. Usually when I write something critical of Apple, the results are mixed. Some people are supportive, but far more people attack. This time the ratio is very different. Almost everyone who has commented gets that there's a huge problem here. Can we solve this problem? Of course we can.  Some say that other vendors do this too. That gives me less comfort, not more. That means there's no escaping this crazy way of treating user's confidentiality. Ultimately it hurts the vendors because people can't use their computers for things the manufacturers say we can.  Further, it's got to be an issue for the banks, brokerage firms, credit agencies. If you are a newspaper and you employ reporters and they use a computer, how exactly are you guarding the confidentiality of your sources? If you're a confidential source, don't you have an interest when the reporter gives their computer manufacturer all their data to do with as they please? Imagine what you would do if it turned out there was a bug in a Netgear or Linksys router that allowed, under special circumstances, a mailicous person to gain access to the full content of your hard disk at any time. Would you have a problem with that? This is worse than Microsoft's neglect of malware that got me to stop using their computers. In that case it was Microsoft being neglegent. This time Apple itself is the cause of the problem. It's as if they planted a virus in their operating system that entitled them, under special circumstances, completely out of the user's control, to gain access to everything on your disk, with as much time as they want, with no way for you to prevent or even detect the intrusion.  See also: My letter to Steve Jobs.
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Cryptography is no mean field. After all, the science was invented by humans for the purpose of concealing information from other humans. That means that the best cryptographers have to be blindingly smart, with a mastery of mathematics but also a firm grasp of human psychology and, these days, fields such as computer science.
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New browser security technology is in the works and due for display at RSA in February.
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Technique lets intruders exploit flaws previously thought to be insignificant, says security researcher.
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The outsourcing of security Comment It's the end of yet another RSA security conference, and we're tempted to trade our PCs for an abacus and hole up in the basement while the nightmarish robot invasion on mankind plays out. Malware, we were repeatedly told over the past five days, is lurking everywhere - in PCs, phones and online bazaars - and is waiting for the opportune moment to slip into our toasters and refrigerators.â¦