Government Computer News
New security tools focus on the data
SAN FRANCISCO—The increasing mobility of digitized data and a growing concern over privacy is driving security from the network perimeter down to the data level.
Digg
De.licio.us
Slashdot
Technorati
"The United States is just now starting to accept this," said Todd LaPorte, channel sales manager from Utimaco Safeware AG of Germany. "The U.S. market is absolutely exploding."
Utimaco is one of a host of companies showcasing data security and management tools at the RSA Security Conference this week. The company's flagship product, SafeGuard Easy, is a disk encryption tool that protects data on desktop and mobile devices.
"It is for data at rest," LaPorte said. "Once it has been decrypted and is being used, it's out of our purview."
For data in use, Digital Guardian from Verdasys Inc. of Waltham, Mass., monitors system calls that have data components.
"We do data security at the point of use," said Verdasys CEO Seth Birnbaum. New Technology such as finger-sized USB drives with multigigabyte storage makes it imperative to keep track of how data is being used. "You can take everything out of an enterprise through a desktop."
For sensitive data on the move, Beachhead Solutions Inc. of Santa Clara, Calif., offers the nuclear option. Lost Data Destruction is a software agent that wipes data from mobile devices that have been lost or stolen. The need to make sensitive intelligence both readily available and secure from misuses was the driver for creating LDD, said vice president of marketing Jeff Rubin. "You can't keep it all on one server at Langley today," Rubin said. "You have to have access to it."
The shrinking security perimeter has been a trend for several years, with more security moving inside the network. But the process is speeding up because of government regulations that make custodians of information accountable for it. The Federal Information Security Management Act and California's privacy disclosure law essentially require administrators to be able to protect data and to document the safeguards.
"Now it's no longer an option," Birnbaum said.
Utimaco's SafeGuard Easy uses the Advanced Encryption Standard with 128- or 256-bit keys to encrypt either entire disks or disk sectors, rather than files.
"It encrypts any form of portable memory device you can think of," LaPorte said, including notebook PCs, removable disks and USB drivers.
![1105 Government Information Group [valor]](/images/1105logo_website.gif "Government Computer News [valor]")
© 1996-2008 1105 Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
