Corporations need to do more to protect their data. Security breaches at financial institutions and credit card processing centers demonstrate the risk of exposing non-public personal information to hackers and malicious folks. Similarly, mobile devices can contain vital business information: imagine what damage a competitor might do with a list of your customers and sales prospects.
Encryption is a critical part of the solution for protecting your company's data on your mobile device (and everywhere else, for that matter). Even though your company may have security standards, you should be aware of this technology in order to ensure that your data is secure. This article answers a series of questions on this topic in order to help you understand encryption technology and the ways you can use it in order to protect data stored on (and transferred to and from) your device.
What is encryption?
Encryption is a way to make data unreadable to others while still allowing authorized users to access it. It requires the user or system to have a specific key and software to encrypt and decrypt the data. It utilizes various mathematical algorithms for transforming clear text into cipher text and then back again.
There are a couple of standards for encryption you should be aware of in this discussion. Encryption uses the CPU of the computer intensively to perform the encryption and decryption operations. So, when you use encryption the computer system is slowed by performing the encryption and decryption; also, the size of the data may increase due to the encryption operation. These are the main reasons why all data is not encrypted today. Generally the longer the encryption key the harder it is for the encryption to be broken by trying all possible permutations of the key. (Trying every possible key is referred to as brute-force decryption.)
What encryption is used when you access a Web site?
When you visit a Web site that uses HTTPS (or SSL), it is using a digital certificate issued by an authorized company to allow you to access the site. It sets up an encrypted session between your browser and the Web site, so that all data that passes between the two (passwords, credit card numbers, etc.) is encrypted at its origin, en-route, and at the destination. (With Internet Explorer, for instance, you look for a closed-lock icon at the bottom of the browser to ensure that your session is encrypted during an HTTPS session.) HTTPS is accomplished using a digital signature with the certificate which you can see on your desktop by clicking FileProperties and click on the Certificates button.
Originally Web browsers supported 40 bit and 128 bit encryption keys because the United States restricted the export of 128 bit encryption; however, today the standard is 128 bits. Also some companies now use locally signed certificates. These locally signed certificates need to be installed on each Pocket PC or Smartphone to before the devices can access secured internal company Web sites or the company's Exchange 2003 server.
What is the 3DES encryption standard?
Triple Data Encryption Standard (3DES) is the most common encryption standard used in the enterprise today. 3DES is where 3 different 56 bit keys are used to encrypt the data three times. 3DES uses a 168 bit key, which is long enough that it is not easy to break. It is most commonly used in Virtual Private Networks.
What is the AES encryption standard?
AES stands for the Advanced Encryption Standard. It uses 128 bit symmetrical blocks to encrypt the data. So you can have AES128, AES256, AES384, etc. by increasing the key size by 128 bits. It has been adopted by the United States Government as its official standard for encrypting data.
What is the Blowfish encryption standard?
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