* Proposed standards protect information on disk and tape
P1619 safeguards data at rest
By Fabio Maino
For the past few years, banking, credit and retail industries have been rocked by one massive data theft after another. The common thread: The data was not encrypted and thus was available to criminals looking to steal private identity and financial information.
To counter this disturbing trend, the IEEE Security in Storage Working Group (SISWG) is developing two related standards that use encryption to protect stored data, known as data at rest. The first, P1916, is nearing completion; it sets out to protect data stored on disks. The more recent standard, P1619.1, is for protecting data stored on tape.
Work on the disk security standard began almost four years ago with an investigation into how the challenge should be addressed. Encryption was regarded as the most straightforward and reliable means of data protection, but it was problematic because 512-byte disk blocks contained no extra space to insert traditional cryptographic computations known as integrity check values (ICV). Another method had to be found to protect the data.
Better approach
SISWG solved the problem with the help of the Liskov Rivest Wagner advanced encryption standard, a length-preserving algorithm. This let the encrypted data be the same size as the plain text data, affording limited integrity protection while eliminating the need to add an ICV.
To read more about the IEEE’s proposed standards to protect information on disk and tape, please click here.
