tISS: Cryptography - Tackling the latest Challenges

Understand how cryptography is being used in the corporate environment today and ways to overcome the challenges faced when rolling out a solution.

Cryptography has been around for centuries, with the Egyptians, Greeks and Caesar being famous for using it to their advantage.

The Second World War then became a defining moment in the history of cryptography and placed it squarely at the centre of military and political strategy from that time to the present day. Encryption and decryption was at the heart of the legendary cracking of Enigma codes at Bletchley Park, and now it is at the heart of modern-day computing in safeguarding sensitive corporate data.

With online commerce now accounting for an increasing share of economic activity, organisations are having to adopt cryptography as part of Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance requirements to safeguard their customers' credit card data. But cryptography is complex, even daunting to adopt. So corporate encouragement and education of the uses of encryption is a necessity.

With the market flooded with many differing types, flavours and colours of encryption, how do you know which method to use? Which strategies, e.g. encryption of a file vs the entire hard drive, work best? And how do you tackle the ongoing challenges of data retrieval, user education and key management?

This Forum workshop was attended by 12 delegates representing 9 organisations from a wide cross-section of industries, including airlines, brewing, travel and leisure, packaging, pharmaceuticals, retail and utilities.

The workshop set out to ensure attendees went away with a clear understanding of how cryptography is being used in today's corporate environment while learning from each other how best to overcome the challenges faced and to structure their security strategies.

The agenda covered the following:

• Coping with the complexity of cryptography
• Interoperability and standards
• Encrypting static data and data on the move
• Key management and data recovery
• User management, guidelines and policies
• Audit, legislation and legalities
• Recommended products and services