Cloud Hosting

The benefits brought forth by digitisation surround us and have a positive impact on virtually every aspect of our modern lives. This progress is only set to expand further as connectivity proliferates and smart cities and Internet of Things environments abound.

This progress, however, comes at a cost, which is that increasingly interconnected, intelligent, and instrumented eco-systems are more open to cyber and other threats.

In much the same way as we believe the gains from digitisation far outweigh the negative consequences of a widening cyber threat surface, we also believe resilient encryptions serve a greater positive role in society than they do a negative or potentially menacing one.

There are by far more progressive things being protected by strong encryption than there are foreboding activities being perpetuated behind the protection offered by encrypted communications.

We advise the establishment of a good implementation of End-2-End Encryption (E2E), which means that nobody in between whether its the device manufacturer, the Internet Service Provider, the telecom companies nor any eavesdropper should be able to decrypt the data.

Such an encryption technique could be further improved with the use of Perfect and Future Forward Secrecy, where the encryption keys and the exchange keys are used only once, then destroyed forensically and never used again, and in which future keys cannot decrypt past messages.

In addition to encryption, we advise enterprises and governments to look at all the end points that might affect data in transit and at rest. It is just as critical to know who and what touches the data in the internal network, the storage network or cloud, as it is to secure the data in transit.

(By Leo Cole, Vice President of Marketing at DarkMatter. He may be contacted on Twitter @coleleoj)

Read the original post:
Gains from encryption continue to outweigh the pain - AMEinfo