[ISN] What Auditors Are Saying About Compliance And Encryption

http://www.darkreading.com/database-security/167901020/security/encryption/229301041/what-auditors-are-saying-about-compliance-and-encryption.html

By Kelly Jackson Higgins
Darkreading 
March 15, 2011 

In more than half of the audits they have conducted, both internal IT 
security and external auditors say the companies either failed or had 
serious deficiencies in their security compliance. And more than half 
say organizations are employing encryption purely for compliance 
reasons, according to a new report.

The Ponemon Institute's "What Auditors Think About Crypto" report, 
commissioned by Thales, is based on a survey of more than 500 auditors. 
Nearly half of them believe that audits and assessments should be mainly 
for rooting out risks and vulnerabilities, 42 percent say it should be 
for determining compliance for internal policies, and 34 percent say it 
should be for checking compliance with regulatory and legal mandates.

The auditors favor encryption for data protection compliance: Eighty-two 
percent say encryption has a role in protecting sensitive data during 
some point of its life cycle, and 81 percent say this type of data 
should be encrypted when possible. "Business confidential information, 
health information and financial or accounting information and payment 
transactions (including credit cards) are the most important types of 
information to encrypt. More than half (53 percent) do not believe that 
the convenience of the end-user should be considered when deciding what 
to encrypt," the report says.

Encryption or tokenization? For locking down sensitive data in 
databases, 54 percent of the auditors say encryption, and 15 percent say 
tokenization. Nearly 40 percent say data-masking is best for sensitive 
data not in the database, while 28 percent point to truncation. Around 
55 percent say stored data should be encrypted, 17 percent say it should 
be tokenized, and 43 percent call for encryption for data at the point 
of capture. Even so, they say encryption and key management aren't easy. 
They ranked key management, protecting stored keys, and controlling the 
use of keys as the main challenges.

[...]


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