Question

Suppose you work for a company that handles sensitive data relating to their customers. Your boss is opposed to employing encryption to protect the data. List three justifications you could give for why using encryption would be a prudent business decision.

(Computer Security II)

Answer 1

When we talk about encryption, we are talking about security. As for any company or for any client the data security, is the most important aspect of any development. The data encryption will have major impact on the following fields:

1. Confidentiality - keeping data private

Confidentiality refers to protecting information from being accessed by unauthorized parties. In other words, only the people who are authorized to do so can gain access to sensitive data. A failure to maintain confidentiality means that someone who shouldn't have access has managed to get it, through intentional behavior or by accident. Such a failure of confidentiality, commonly known as a breach, typically cannot be remedied.Nearly all the major security incidents reported in the media today involve major losses of confidentiality.

So, in summary, a breach of confidentiality means that someone gains access to information who shouldn't have access to it.

2.Integrity - the accuracy of your data

Integrity refers to ensuring the authenticity of information—that information is not altered, and that the source of the information is genuine. Imagine that you have a website and you sell products on that site. That would be a failure of integrity, because your information—in this case, the price of a product—has been altered and you didn't authorize this alteration. Another example of a failure of integrity is when you try to connect to a website and a malicious attacker between you and the website redirects your traffic to a different website.

3.Availability - keeping your web server online and data available

Availability means that information is accessible by authorized users. If an attacker is not able to compromise the first two elements of information security (see above) they may try to execute attacks like denial of service that would bring down the server, making the website unavailable to legitimate users due to lack of availability.