For 81% of Information Security’s Auditors, Sensitive/Confidential Data Should Be Encrypted

Encryption is considered the most effective technology to achieve compliance – deployment choices and key management best practices remain critical to success

Thales, in information systems and communications security, announces a survey and report, What Auditors Think about Crypto Technologies.

The report, based on research recently conducted by the Ponemon Institute sponsored by Thales e-Security, reveals that crypto technologies play a crucial role in data protection and compliance activities across a wide range of industry sectors, in both private and public organizations.

More than 500 auditors were surveyed for the report with roughly half representing internal IT security audit teams and half representing independent external audit companies and consultancies. 44% of those surveyed had more than 10 years of experience with 46% holding the CISA accreditation and 24% acting as qualified security assessor (QSA) for PCI DSS audits.

One of the key findings of the research is that encryption and other uses of cryptography have become essential components of a data protection strategy and compliance program. Seventy-one percent of the auditors surveyed believe that an organization’s information assets cannot be fully protected, even within the corporate boundary, without the use of cryptography. Eighty-one percent believe that sensitive or confidential data should be encrypted whenever practical. Business confidential information, health information and financial or accounting information and payment transactions (including credit cards) were considered the most important types of information to encrypt.

In considering where to recommend that cryptography should be most effectively deployed the, auditors cited an organization’s internal application infrastructure, external service providers (particularly cloud based SaaS), end user devices (laptops and desktops) and external business partners as the areas that are the greatest source of audit failures.

Selecting from the numerous scenarios where cryptography can be deployed within a typical organization the auditors most frequently rated the following as being highly effective in achieving compliance goals:

• desktop and mobile device encryption (76%)
• encryption of traffic over public networks (71%)
• database encryption (63%) and
•  storage level encryption (56%).

Focusing specifically on the area of data confidentiality; encryption, whether deployed to protect a database, storage system, application or data entry system, is recommended more frequently over other techniques for protecting data such as tokenization, truncation and data masking – within databases and storage systems, encryption is recommended more than three times more often than any of these alternatives. However, the auditors highlight key management as a primary deployment challenge.

In particular, when auditors were asked to identify the most pressing issues, top of the list came:

• the administration of key management systems (29%),
• protecting stored keys (20%) and
• controlling the use of keys (19%).

The findings support the use of hardware security modules (HSMs) to ease these key management challenges and achieve compliance.  Sixty eight percent of the auditors responded that the use of HSMs for encryption and key management reduces the time spent on demonstrating compliance with privacy and data protection requirements. This compares to a figure of 63% when the Ponemon Institute asked the same question of more than 200 PCI DSS auditors (QSA’s) a year ago. With the apparent growing recognition that HSMs play a critical part in the deployment of cryptography, it is not surprising that more than two thirds (79%) of auditors that took part in this new survey recommend the use of an HSM instead of relying on software-based systems to protect keys and enforce key management policies. Furthermore, 46% of the auditors surveyed go one step further and actually require the use of HSMs, a significant increase over the figure of 35% that imposed the same requirement among the QSAs surveyed a year ago.

"The use of encryption to protect data is now past the point of debate, everyone is using it and this report corroborates this.  However, the question to be addressed now is how, when and where to deploy the technology. The research indicates that there are indeed genuine areas of uncertainty when deploying encryption, particularly arising from the numerous business drivers and diverse compliance requirements," says Dr Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute. "What organizations now need to do is ensure they adopt a strategic approach, proactively identifying and then following best practice when deploying cryptography to ensure they not only meet compliance around data protection but they also serve their wider security and operational needs."

"Protecting customer and business data ought to be top priority for every organization, but demonstrating compliance does not inherently translate into data security. This survey reinforces the increasingly widespread acceptance that encryption and other uses of cryptography are important for achieving compliance requirements such as PCI DSS, HIPAA/HITECH and avoiding the penalties of many data breach disclosure laws," says Franck Greverie, Thales Vice President in charge of Information Technology Security activities. "The report provides a valuable insight into the standards of due care that auditors expect to be applied when deploying cryptography, particularly regarding key management. With more than 40 years of proven experience in the field, Thales has long been a proponent of these best practices and works closely with its customers and partners to maximize the effectiveness of their protection investments. By providing hardware security modules, encryption appliances and key management solutions that are certified to the highest industry standards we enable our customers to address their ever growing data protection needs."

In addition to quantifying attitudes towards cryptography the survey also questioned auditors regarding their general attitudes to compliance and IT security. The research found that the majority of auditors believe organizations are still not taking data security seriously and are not allocating sufficient resources to achieve data compliance requirements. Only 32 % of those surveyed say that the organizations they audit are proactive in managing privacy and data protection risks with less than half (45%) applying sufficient resources to achieve their data compliance requirements.

What Auditors Think about Crypto Technologies is a Ponemon Institute report, sponsored by Thales and is the result of a survey of 505 auditors of information security systems, information security auditors, qualified security assessors and EDP auditors.

To download the report (you need to register)