Brian Tokuyoshi - Product Marketing Manager

I recently met with a customer who was concerned about his data retention policies. He’s responsible for a number of servers and data on mainframes, and he fully supports the idea of doing encryption to keep it safe.

This particular customer understands the  value of using open standards for encryption. He said the following to me. “We’re encrypting data and backing it up. So let me ask you what you think, you backup the data, you backup the key, but do you backup the application?” That’s a problem that never occurred to me, because PGP Encryption Platform applications use the OpenPGP standard. Files encrypted with PGP software can be decrypted with other software that supports the...

Most of the news coming out of the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas focused on the new attack on AES and the bootkit attack on the TrueCrypt full disk encryption product. While these are certainly compelling pieces of research, I also found the reviews of the session on Russian organized crime to be quite interesting. The session was co-hosted by the FBI and McAfee and focused on the causes and consequences of the old line Russian criminal gangs entering the cybercrime business.

Make no mistake, these guys are not hackers that just happen to have turned to the dark side. There's not really a Russian mob so much as there is a mob that happens to be Russian. Russia has a long history of organized criminal gangs that go back to the...

Brian Tokuyoshi - Product Marketing Manager

Most people agree that open standards are good for everyone. Standards help companies deploy products that work together with existing investments, thus reducing the impact and issues of technology displacement. They help developers build products by not having to reinvent the wheel, and build upon the work that has already been done. It establishes some common ground that bridges the gap between the interdependencies for related products.

Perhaps one of the challenges for standards is recognizing the need for one, and the unforeseen and currently unattainable future that provides the benefit for all. Standards do not emerge without a need in the market, which typically originates from the proliferation of one-off proprietary technologies. The creators of said proprietary technologies tend to not want to give ground to an open standard, because they profit by locking in customers to their interpretation of...

Brian Tokuyoshi - Product Marketing Manager

When people new to cryptography first start to learn about public keys, they start with the basics, usually involving a person named Alice and a person named Bob. One maxim that they learn is that a message encrypted by one’s public key could only be decrypted with the corresponding private key. (I get a little tired of reading about analogies with Alice and Bob, so I’m going to use different names. Let’s go with Angelina and Brad). If Angelina wants to send Brad a private message, she uses a copy of his public key to encrypt the message. Brad, the recipient, uses his private key to access the message. That portion of public key cryptography is easily understood.

Now let’s take an example using encrypted email, which often has more than one recipient.  If Angelina sends an encrypted email to two people, and uses the public key for each person, shouldn’t there be two...