Security > EncryptionEssentials

Fifteen-year-old Peter Schmidt-Nielsen spent only a month working on his submission, but he thinks he's come up with something "unusual and new." Never mind that he's up against some of the most famous cryptographers in the world.

Researchers have created an optical network component that they say can encrypt data traveling at 100G bps (bits per second), far outpacing current electronic encryption technologies.

I often disagree when the so-called experts talk about security in terms of binary decisions. Managing security risk is always a cost/benefit trade-off compared to the value of the thing being protected.

Users of Apple's MobileMe have already discovered that the US$99-per-year service is sometimes slow and unreliable, and they're now talking about another shortcoming that was intentional.

Every year, more than 5,000 laptops are lost in taxis in London, New York, Chicago and other large cities. According to our research, in 2008 companies' topmost security investment was laptop encryption. Laptop hard drives are getting bigger and now can hold hundreds of thousand to hundreds of millions of sensitive records.

If you are running a Debian-based Linux system and haven't already caught up with the announcement [1] that there was a major flaw with the generation of SSH, OpenVPN, DNSSEC, SSL/TLS session keys and X.509 certificate key material, you might want to update your system to address the problem.

As long as IT managers encrypt data using only one vendor's products, the keys used to decrypt that data can be relatively easy to manage. But it will likely become much more complicated as more vendors build encryption into more and different types of storage devices, each with their own key management system, and as users need to move encrypted data among devices for disaster recovery, legal discovery or simply everyday business communications.

PGP Monday announced it plans to make its encryption interfaces openly available. In addition, the company announced it intends to obtain Common Criteria certification for its disk encryption and Universal Gateway Email products.

HP this week is unveiling add-ons for its storage products that enable automated encryption of data stored on tape drives and virtual tape libraries.