Back before Jerry Garcia moved on to the big pot cloud in the sky, I managed security at a couple of Dead shows in Boulder/Denver. In those days I was the assistant director for event security at the University of Colorado (before a short stint as director), and the Dead thought it would be better to bring us Boulder guys into Denver to manage the show there since we’d be less ‘aggressive’. Of course we all also worked as regular staff or supervisors for the company running the shows in Denver,…
There’s a bit of debate brewing in the comments on the latest post in our database encryption series. That series is meant to focus only on database encryption, so we weren’t planning about talking much about other options, but it’s an important issue.
In the selection process for database encryption solutions, too often the discussion devolves straight into the encryption technologies: the algorithms, computational complexity, key lengths, merits of public vs. private key cryptography, key management, and the like.
I was drafting a post last week on credit card security when I read Rich’s piece on How Market Forces Can Fix PCI. Rather than looking at improving PCI-DSS from a specification-centric perspective, he presented some ideas on improving its effectiveness through incentivizing auditors differently. A few of the points he raised clarified for me why looking at market drivers such as this are the only way we are going to understand the coming security changes to this industry. It’s a good post and…
Like many potential iPhone buyers, I have been checking the news releases from the Apple WWDC every hour or so. Faster speed, better camera, better OS, new apps. What’s not to like? From a security standpoint, the two features that were intriguing for me and (probably) many IT organizations are the data encryption and automatic remote data wipe options. From MacWorld:
Thanks to some bad timing on the part of our new daughter, I managed to miss the window to refresh my EMT certification and earned the privilege of spending two weekends in a refresher class. The class isn’t bad, but I’ve been riding this horse for nearly 20 years (and have the attention span of a garden gnome), so it’s more than a little boring.
Ran across this article on CNN last Friday about how Facebook was going to launch a micro-payment service. Facebook wants to introduce its own virtual currency system that involves credits, coupons, and other types of widgets that can be redeemed for goods or cash.
If you have ever listened to Rich or myself present on data centric security or endpoint encryption, we typically end by saying “Encrypt your freakin’ laptops.” It works. The performance is not terrible and it’s pretty much “set and forget”. We should also throw in “Encrypt your freakin’ USB keys” as well. The devices are lost on a regular basis and still very few have encrypted data on them. I confess that I am fairly lazy and have not been doing this, but started to look into encryption when…
You ever watch a movie or TV show where you know you know the ending, but you keep viewing in suspense to find out how it actually happens?
Updated June 4th to reflect terminology change.
This is the Re -Introduction to our Database Encryption series. Why are we re-introducing this series? I’m glad you asked. The more we worked on the separation of duties and key management sections, the more dissatisfied we became. Rich and I got some really good feedback from vendors and end users, and we felt we were missing the mark with this series. And not just because the stuff I drafted when I was sick completely lacked clarity of thought,…