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ehteshamuniverse · 5 years ago

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Identity as a Service Market Estimated to Lock an Ineffaceable Growth | 18.4% CAGR Through 2024 | COVID-19 Analysis of Identity as a Service Market

Market Highlights

The global Identity-as-a-Service (IDaaS) market 2020 offers a steady compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2019 to 2024 of 18.4%, making the total market worth USD 10.8 billion in 2024. These figures are accumulated after an in-depth study has been conducted through Market Research Future that eminently focuses on the information and communication industry. The industry brings up the study case based on commentary on the key influencing factors, market statistics, revenues gains, segmental data, regional data, are focused that eventually captures all the facets of the evolving global identity as a service (IDaaS) market.

Key Drivers & Barriers

Identity-as-a-Service is becoming more popular amongst many organizations across the globe, owing to its feasibility in terms of management and cost range. It could be defined as a cloud-based service used explicitly for providing identity and access management solutions. It is beneficial, as it not only reduces on-site infrastructure but also offers a wide range of integration options. The significant concerns regarding the hype of Identity-as-a-Service are identity and data protection as well as trusting a third party with sensitive business data.

The global Identity-as-a-Service market is perceiving growth owing to the beneficiaries that it provides to the enterprises to use sign-on (SSO) with using Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) or OpenID Connect (OIDC), authentication and access controls to give secure access to software and SaaS applications. As per the study, medium and large scale industries are adopting this type of authentication infrastructure rapidly. Even the factor such as increasing level of interconnectivity owing to rising IoT and BYOD trends across verticals is yet offering lucrative opportunities for the IDaaS vendors capitalizing on the market in the forecast period.

Other factors, such as fast growth in IT infrastructure has given a considerable rise to new vulnerabilities and opportunities to the market, based on which it is witnessing massive growth ways. The cloud-based security solutions and services, such as IDaaS, offer significant advantages, one being cost-effective, and the other offers 24x7 monitoring. Therefore, the rising demand for cloud-based security solutions is motivating the global IDaaS market for the future. Sensing the immense growth potential for the providers of identity-as-a-service in the IoT-driven industrial ecosystem, the market has achieved a lot in the latest years from the previous years and hopes to bring more in the forecast period.

On the contrary, the concerns of businesses regarding data security are limiting the growth of the market. Many enterprises prefer on-premises identity and access management systems as they are more secure, thus becoming a significant challenge for the vendors in the Identity-as-a-Service market.

Segmentation:

The global Identity-as-a-Service market has been analyzed upon various segments such as organization size, service, deployment, and vertical.

Depending on service segment, the global market of IDaaS comprises of access, identity governance & administration, and intelligence.

Depending on organization size segment, the IDaaS market comprises of small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) and large enterprise.

Depending on deployment, the IDaaS market includes public cloud, private cloud, and hybrid.

Depending on vertical segment, the IDaaS market comprises of IT and telecommunication, banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI), energy and utilities, retail and CPG, healthcare and life sciences, manufacturing, government and defense, transportation, and more.

Regional Framework

Analysts of MRFR’s study on the identity-as-a-service (IDaaS) market has marked some of the key regions for determining the market’s future shares and rising stakeholders. North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and the rest of the world are chosen regions where study of the market has been conducted.

North America region has the potential to acquire the prominent market size in the forecast period. The US leads the market in this region, owing to the early adoption of DevSecOps practices for identity and access management. Even strict government directives for data protection are rising, which is yet another prime reason for the market’s spread in a rapid mode. The rising cyber threats and growing demand for strong identification and authentication solutions on the cloud are also motivating the IDaaS market in the region.

Similarly, growth aspects in BFSI, retail& consumer electronics, as well as the healthcare industry in countries such as China and India in the Asia Pacific, are fostering the market’s share. Rapid infrastructure development, speedy advancements in technology, fast-expanding electronic payment industry, the growing trend of the BYOD policy, as well as huge adoption of cloud security solutions are also becoming the reason for identity-as-a-service market’s growth in the region.

Market Players

Leading players in the identity-as-a-service landscape are IDaptive, LLC. (US), Oracle Corporation (US), Okta, Inc. (US), Avatier (US), OneLogin, Inc (US), Microsoft Corporation, (US), Centrify Corporation (US), Fischer Identity (US), Ping Identity (US), iWelcome (Netherlands), VMWare (US), empowerID (US), LoginRadius (Canada), and Ubisecure, Inc. (Finland).

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viditure · 6 years ago

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SSO – the new standard in password optimisation

Who hasn’t fallen prey to password fatigue from time to time? The plethora of passwords we have to memorise and re-create for applications and resources, such as data centres, cloud applications and social networking sites has exploded over the last few years. This has not only led to frustration and wasted hours, but also serious security risks. The sheer volume of passwords as well as requirements to make them increasingly complex and randomised has made it impossible for people to create a unique and strong password every time. The result? Most people use a simple obvious password for every service – which leaves their accounts vulnerable to hacking – or even worse, they write their secret codes down and leave them near their computer…

Single sign-on (SSO) authentication allows users to sign into a system only once and still access third party services It is a cost-effective and safe way to provide customers, suppliers and employees complete access to data and application functionality across multiple related, yet independent software systems.

A growth market

With the rise in cloud technology, mobile, and social media, the global SSO market is expanding fast and is predicted to almost double in size to $1.6 billion by 2021. Although it is spread across the globe, North America accounts for most of the share, and major growth is expected in the Asia-Pacific region with the increasing adoption of single sign-on solutions across India, China, Japan, and Australia. Single sign-on solutions have especially high demand in the banking, financial services and insurance sectors (with centralised session management), but are also widely used in retail, IT and telecom, education, healthcare and life sciences, communications media & services, as well as the travel and hospitality industries.

How does it work?

It couldn’t be easier… When an employee tries to log in to an internal or external company program, the form asks for the company name. When the user provides the details, the service checks if the they are allowed to use the application – the third-party Active Directory (AD) then checks the user’s access rights. The user only needs to enter their credentials once.

The key benefits of SSO

One password to rule them all!

Your users will only have to manage one password to access their whole solution environment. By logging in once to your company environment, they will automatically be connected to each solution to which they have access rights. This is far easier than trying to memorise multiple passwords or writing them down on paper or in a file on your desktop – both of these can be stolen.

Managing your users’ password policy

As your company handles the single password linked to your account, they can define strong password policies for all accesses through that gateway. This is a distinct advantage over the major web solution providers who often demand that users create passwords that are at least eight characters long – don’t contain your user name, real name, or company name – don’t contain a complete word – are significantly different from previous passwords – don’t contain uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers, or symbols, etc. etc. etc.

These requirements are all designed to prevent hackers or bots from guessing your password. When your company uses SSO, they can easily be set on your AD. And by using only one password, your company will apply these policies to all their solutions making the access to any solution considerably safer.

Control users’ accesses to any solution

As long as the solution provides an SSO login system, most ADs can control user access to the range of company solutions. This not only facilitates the management of your company’s employee access rights; it is also useful for centralising the control of your user login details – it removes the need to delete user access on all solutions manually.

This is a huge timesaver if you need to remove an employee’s access to several third-party tools simultaneously – for example if they leave the company. Without SSO, when an employee who has had access to confidential data leaves, IT needs to systematically remove their access rights to each tool. This is risky and can leave holes in a company’s security. SSO is quick and failproof way to cover all the bases when staff leave.

Safer login with strong known secured protocol

Although SSO allows you to have global access to various third-party tools, it requires state-of-the-art technologies to ensure that there are no leaks, and that your users’ logins and credentials can’t be easily hacked. AT Internet’s SAML 2.0 (Security Assertion Markup Language) and OpenID lead the tech market for login authentication systems. As part of the Analytics Suite, SAML and OpenID’s access rights system provides an SSO login framework that helps you build an easier and safer access to its solutions.

Stay secure and remain competitive!

Adopting a clear strategy for distributed identity management is key to guaranteeing a secure workplace and staying competitive. A federated identity solution is important for any company trying to manage access to external services by internal users – and provide access to its internal systems by external users. It allows secure access to a range of applications, as well as centralising their management, and improving the monitoring and auditing of security credentials. It also cuts down on admin costs and the associated headaches…

Article SSO – the new standard in password optimisation first appeared on Digital Analytics Blog.

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terabitweb · 6 years ago

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Original Post from SC Magazine Author: victorthomas

Cloud-based IAM puts authentication to the test

Traditional brick-and-mortar organizations with on-premise servers are striving every day to keep pace with cloud-driven digital enterprises that are untethered by physical restraints, enabling employees to work from anywhere, accessing applications, services and mobile devices as regular parts of their flexible workdays.

However, much like ducks on the surface of a pond, the challenges inherent in migrating from traditional, on-premise operations to transformed, cloud-driven services is generating a frenzy of activity just beneath the surface.

For most organizations, migrating to cloud services is still heavily labor and resource-intensive, and can create serious operational deficiencies if not properly implemented with security protections built-in from the start. And those ongoing operational deficiencies only widen the attack surface, threatening to harm an organization’s bottom line.

This is why organizations must focus on reducing complexities and strengthen security protections, especially identity and access management (IAM). Finding ways to make IAM simpler and more informative can help reduce operational risks, although it remains a daunting challenge for most organizations today.

IAM is used in both traditional and cloud-based organizations to protect assets, ensure user identities, achieve regulatory compliance and deliver friendlier customer experiences in an agile, efficient way. Access Management-as-a-Service (AMaaS) offerings are growing increasingly popular. Gartner Inc., estimates that 75 percent or more of clients based in North America and approximately 50 percent in Europe, and some APAC region countries are seeking Identity-as-a-Service (IDaaS) delivery models for new access management purchases.

Most companies today fully recognize the need to protect identities and manage access to corporate resources. But “they often fall short when it comes to planning for and investing in necessary security mechanisms such as IAM, to help ensure strong asset protection,” says Michael Osterman, president of Osterman Research, Inc.

To shrink a company’s attack surface, Osterman recommends that organizations use a centralized repository “to create, authenticate, and save user identities in a single, ‘federated’ identity database.”

Critical operational systems require higher levels of authentication, he adds. And “behavioral analytics can help an organization establish what actions constitute normal behavior and what other actions might be problematic,” he explains.

But while executives grasp the concepts involved in IAM, “they typically don’t invest until something bad happens,” he adds.

Traditional IAM tools are often cumbersome and complex to deploy and maintain, and many cloud services do not deploy automatically with strong IAM security mechanisms in place. This means, as organizations migrate more of their infrastructure to the cloud, the need to address complex authorization controls for cloud-based resources will only grow. Policy-driven, attribute-based access controls (ABAC) for IAM can help provide fast, dynamic authorization to cloud services, Osterman says, enabling secure access to services, along with other critical assets, such as applications and data stored in the cloud.

Michael Osterman, president, Osterman Research

Managing identities and access

IAM is used to manage the roles and access privileges of individual users and the circumstances by which users are granted (or denied) access privileges. Users can include everyone from customers to suppliers to partners and employees. IAM creates one digital identity per individual. Once a digital identity has been established, it must be maintained, modified and monitored throughout each user’s access lifecycle.

IAM is considered crucial to controlling access to enterprise resources, by the right users, in the right context, from the time a user joins an organization and gains permission to access certain resources to that user’s departure and timely de-authorization. Security administrators use IAM tools and technologies to change a user’s role, track user activities, create reports about user activities, and continuously enforce access control policies.

Designed originally to provide a means for administering and controlling employee access, either to applications or to physical buildings across an organization, IAM tools also help ensure compliance with corporate policies and government regulations, says Bill Newhouse, deputy director of the National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education (NICE) and senior security engineer at the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE), both based out of the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) offices in Gaithersburg, Md.

There are two basic security elements required to control access to systems and data: authentication and authorization. Authentication is the process required to sign into an application or log in to a computer. The entire purpose of authentication, including multi-factor authentication (MFA), is to enable security functions to complete authorization, Newhouse explains.

Authorization determines which buttons a user can click, which accounts he or she may edit, and even which files or databases each user is allowed to access.

MFA has grown to become an essential element of cloud-based IAM, to ensure user identities no matter where they are working from on any given day. There are some weaknesses, however, says Adrian Lane, security analyst and CTO for Securosis in Phoenix. “There have been SMS messages advances such as behavioral analytics for both the user and devices, to authenticate users.

“Cloud security providers typically use multiple attributes and can adjust access policies for any user or role, which dramatically improves identity and access control,” Lane explains. In too many cases, however, “organizations have yet to take full advantage of the more granular, attribute-based, policy-driven IAM services available from cloud security providers,” he adds.

Understanding cloud IAM

Cloud-based IAM security services are considered next-generation tools, combining concepts of Identity-as-a-Service (IaaS) and enterprise mobility management (EMM).

While traditional or legacy IAM products were designed to handle logins and user activities from a centralized location, for a specific enterprise, or for proprietary applications and known endpoints, cloud identity management is optimized for integration across devices, operating systems, applications and resources.

Andras Cser, analyst, Forrester Research

This is essential because migration to the cloud opens access to endpoints that are typically outside of brick and mortar buildings and spread across multiple locations, Lane explains.

Industry observers maintain cloud IAM services can manage user access to Wi-Fi networks, connect cloud servers, and facilitate authentication. Properly implemented, it can prevent outside threat actors from reaching corporate databases and in a “least privileges” security model, it also keeps insider threats at bay.

As organizations modernize, some are finding cloud-based IAM is often not well suited for accessing on-premises applications. Authentication protocols must expand and scale as an organization’s IT environment scales, to provide necessary security protections, while balancing employee and customer needs for access to resources. As organizations embrace cloud services, they need stronger, all-around governance across all platforms. This creates an operational challenge with underlying technical difficulties, according to Gartner Research Vice President Lori Robinson.

Gartner analysts maintain cloud IAM that leverages SAML-based (Security Assertion Markup Language) authentication and multifactor authentication can help IT security teams manage the challenges involved with decentralized user accounts. According to Gartner, “access to cloud databases and assets must be tightly monitored, especially during employee onboarding and off-boarding processes. Cloud IAM services can also track which users are accessing which resources and when, which is vital information for security and regulatory compliance.”

As organizations migrate to cloud services they must focus on how cloud services are accessed, along with the speed and pace of migrating additional apps and services. The trouble is, many organizations today still struggle to properly implement traditional on-premise IAM, says NIST’s Newhouse.

Each organization’s security teams must gain a clear understanding of whether current IAM platforms will also protect cloud storage. If not, it is time to evaluate cloud-based IAM alternatives. “Employees, customers and the organization’s reputation are at stake without proper IAM security protections in place,” says Newhouse.

Merritt Maxim, analyst, Forrester Research

Ultimately, every organization needs strong IAM to protect cloud and on-premise resources. A recent Forrester Research report says cloud-based IAM has “completely transformed the IAM market landscape,” by delivering identity and access management at a reduced cost and with less complexity, adding cloud scalability and elasticity advantages. Analysts Andras Cser and Merritt Maxim describe the current IAM market as currently “divided between established vendors with ‘on-premise pedigree’ who are making the switch to the cloud, and those ‘born in the cloud.’”

While legacy systems and security vendors provide robust IAM capabilities, Forrester analysts warn those platforms can be difficult to implement and maintain. In some cases, industry analysts report IAM platforms have failed to live up to expectations because of their cost and increasing complexity. Many organizations face difficulties integrating access control between older on-premise servers and cloud services.

“While extending IAM to the cloud in hybrid environments isn’t an insurmountable challenge, it’s no easy task, and many organizations end up opting to outsource this task,” says Lane.

One cloud IAM challenge occurs in identity provisioning — the secure and timely management of on-boarding and off-boarding users in the cloud. “It takes careful planning to ensure system resources are properly allocated so performance doesn’t degrade drastically when more users than expected login to access those resources,” Lane explains. According to Forrester’s Cser and Maxim, cloud-native providers deliver IAM features that are easier to implement and use, but which “may not offer the same depth of policy management capabilities that some on-premise pedigree vendors do.”

Choosing the right IAM platform is largely dependent on each organization’s priorities. One organization might choose to focus on securing super user accounts for privileged access management (PAM), while another in a more contentious regulatory arena might focus instead on the management of digital roles or identity governance and administration (IGA). Still other enterprises could opt for modern biometric authentication (BA).

“Only by comparing IAM platforms can an organization determine what will work best to properly secure digital identities,” says Osterman.

Overcoming challenges

Organizations must alter their deployment methods, and the ways they use security tools to effectively manage IAM across multiple cloud services. “There’s a steep learning curve and education required to gain a better understanding of how to manage identities in the cloud,” says Lane.

Another challenge involves managing identities across multiple organizations. Advances such as federated identity management (FIM) can help here, according to Newhouse. FIM enables organizations to authenticate users of cloud services, using the organization’s chosen identity provider. For example, a user with a Google account identity can add various applications provided by external providers. The user logs on using his or her Google account ID to access any applications, and is authenticated and authorized as needed.

Adrian Lane, security analyst and CTO, Securosis

Those just starting the process of purchasing IAM, or in search of a new cloud-based IAM platform, must properly compare current IAM platforms and services. While it is possible to control access manually to organizational resources, manually controlling privileges is often unreliable and inflexible. Ultimately, specialized tools are still needed to ensure the organization’s security team can properly manage identities and access to resources. As companies strive to modernize, automate and streamline operations, Gartner recommends organizations examine leading cloud IAM alternatives to achieve greater security, privacy and regulatory compliance.

Gartner recommends that organizations “craft a robust cloud IAM strategy. Automate and simplify IAM processes for agility and efficiency. Meet changing customer needs with consumer IAM. Protect APIs and ramp up fraud protection.”

Tips and best practices

Gartner recommends organizations focus on “careful” scaling — too narrow creates inconsistent enforcement, too broad will only increase complexity. And the stakes are high. Gartner predicts that by 2021, enterprises with IAM tools will be at a 50 percent lower risk of advanced threat impacts compared to their peers.

Gartner recommends organizations hone in on ways to reduce: Reduce the number of permanent privileged accounts. Reduce the number of shared accounts. Reduce the duration of temporary privileges. Reduce the entitlements of each account. Embracing a principle of least privilege, in which each account has as few entitlements as possible, should be the rule.

Industry observers also stress that organizations must embrace greater governance, especially IGA. Without IGA, organizations risk excess privileges, orphaned accounts, and ownership conflicts that will plague the organization. IGA can aid compliance efforts, audit privileged accounts, and enable access certification. Integrating IAM with IGA can provide the most comprehensive identity and access management available.

Organizations leveraging social media to interact with customers and increase brand awareness need strong IAM in place to protect corporate accounts. Using MFA to alert users of multiple failed login attempts, and educating employees on social media security is crucial to reducing the risk of social identity breaches, according to Lane.

Organizations with many on-premise servers should consider issuing SAML tokens or other assertions that focus on creating roles users can assume to reduce the potential for propagating tens of thousands of orphaned user accounts in the cloud. “When security administrators propagate roles linked to specific job requirements, they can easily add SAML tokens to give users resource access. And when a user leaves, the role remains, Lane explains.

To simplify IAM in hybrid cloud environments, it is important to also focus on ways to reduce access latency to cloud services. Organizations must reduce the latency caused by sending authentication and local authorization requests from the cloud back to on-premise servers, says Lane.

Futures

Industry observers expect organizations will start to embrace greater identity governance elements as they work to better manage identities and access to valuable information and personal identity resources, across everything from mobile devices to cloud services.

Looking ahead, those observers expect growing interest in the ways that IAM fits into the internet of things, or more appropriately, the identity of things. As the number of intelligent things skyrockets, Osterman says, “it’s not difficult to imagine scenarios in which a refrigerator or other smart home technology could be compromised, enabling a hacker to access a consumer’s home network. Because IoT technologies have been rushed to market without a clear focus on security, including IAM, the potential for breaches is enormous.”

Gartner’s Robinson expects artificial intelligence-driven analytics will improve IAM efficiency, especially in reducing bloated administrative procedures, or fraud prevention. Cloud IAM providers can help organizations enable adaptive authentication, analyzing both positive and negative signals of trust to look for ‘normal’ patterns from individual users or types of users.

As organizations increasingly embrace cloud services to achieve digital transformation, they hopefully are starting to realize that their success will depend on IAM.

The post No ID? Get off my cloud appeared first on SC Media.

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Go to Source Author: victorthomas No ID? Get off my cloud Original Post from SC Magazine Author: victorthomas Cloud-based IAM puts authentication to the test Traditional brick-and-mortar organizations with on-premise…

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jadedvillager-blog · 7 years ago

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Security Technologies

Biometrics

Biometrics is the measurement and statistical analysis of people's unique physical and behavioral characteristics. The technology is mainly used for identification and access control, or for identifying individuals who are under surveillance. The basic premise of biometric authentication is that every person can be accurately identified by his or her intrinsic physical or behavioral traits.

Authentication by biometric verification is becoming increasingly common in corporate and public security systems, consumer electronics, and point-of-sale applications. In addition to security, the driving force behind biometric verification has been convenience, as there are no passwords to remember or security tokens to carry. Some biometric methods, such as measuring a person's gait, can operate with no direct contact with the person being authenticated. Biometric data may be held in a centralized database, although modern biometric implementations often depend instead on gathering biometric data locally and then cryptographically hashing it, so that authentication or identification can be accomplished without direct access to the biometric data itself.

Biometric identifiers depend on the uniqueness of the factor being considered. For example, fingerprints are generally considered to be highly unique to each person. Fingerprint recognition, especially as implemented in Apple's Touch ID for the iPhone, is the first widely used mass market application of a biometric authentication factor. The greatest privacy issue of using biometrics is that physical attributes like fingerprints and retinal blood vessel patterns are generally static and cannot be modified. This is in distinction to nonbiometric factors like passwords (something you know) and tokens (something you have), which can be replaced if they are breached or otherwise compromised, including over 20 million individuals whose fingerprints were compromised in the 2014 U.S. Office of Personnel Management data breach. The increasing ubiquity of high-quality cameras, microphones and fingerprint readers in many of today's mobile devices means biometrics will continue to become a more common method for authenticating users, particularly as Fast ID Online (FIDO) has specified new standards for authentication with biometrics that support two-factor authentication with biometric factors.

While high-quality cameras and other sensors help enable the use of biometrics, they can also enable attackers. Because people do not shield their faces, ears, hands, voice or gait, attacks are possible simply by capturing biometric data from people without their consent or knowledge.

Encryption

In computing, encryption is the method by which plaintext or any other type of data is converted from a readable form to an encoded version that can only be decoded by another entity if they have access to a decryption key. Encryption is one of the most important methods for providing data security, especially for end-to-end protection of data transmitted across networks.

Encryption is widely used on the internet to protect user information being sent between a browser and a server, including passwords, payment information and other personal information that should be considered private. Organizations and individuals also commonly use encryption to protect sensitive data stored on computers, servers and mobile devices like phones or tablets.

Unencrypted data, often referred to as plaintext, is encrypted using an encryption algorithm and an encryption key. This process generates ciphertext that can only be viewed in its original form if decrypted with the correct key. Decryption is simply the inverse of encryption, following the same steps but reversing the order in which the keys are applied.

Traditional public key cryptography depends on the properties of large prime numbers and the computational difficulty of factoring those primes. Elliptical curve cryptography (ECC) enables another kind of public key cryptography that depends on the properties of the elliptic curve equation; the resulting cryptographic algorithms can be faster and more efficient and can produce comparable levels of security with shorter cryptographic keys. As a result, ECC algorithms are often implemented in internet of things devices and other products with limited computing resources.

Encryption is used to protect data stored on a system (encryption in place or encryption at rest); many internet protocols define mechanisms for encrypting data moving from one system to another (data in transit). Some applications tout the use of end-to-end encryption (E2EE) to guarantee data being sent between two parties cannot be viewed by an attacker that intercepts the communication channel. Use of an encrypted communication circuit, as provided by Transport Layer Security (TLS) between web client and web server software, is not always enough to insure E2EE; typically, the actual content being transmitted is encrypted by client software before being passed to a web client, and decrypted only by the recipient.

Encryption was almost exclusively used only by governments and large enterprises until the late 1970s when the Diffie-Hellman key exchange and RSA algorithms were first published -- and the first personal computers were introduced. By the mid-1990s, both public key and private key encryption were being routinely deployed in web browsers and servers to protect sensitive data. Encryption is now an important part of many products and services, used in the commercial and consumer realms to protect data both while it is in transit and while it is stored, such as on a hard drive, smartphone or flash drive (data at rest).

Encryption is usually a two-way function, meaning the same algorithm can be used to encrypt plaintext and to decrypt ciphertext. A cryptographic hash function can be viewed as a type of one-way function for encryption, meaning the function output cannot easily be reversed to recover the original input. Hash functions are commonly used in many aspects of security to generate digital signatures and data integrity checks. They take an electronic file, message or block of data and generate a short digital fingerprint of the content called a message digest or hash value.

For any cipher, the most basic method of attack is brute force; trying each key until the right one is found. The length of the key determines the number of possible keys, hence the feasibility of this type of attack. Encryption strength is directly tied to key size, but as the key size increases so, too, do the resources required to perform the computation. Alternative methods of breaking a cipher include side-channel attacks, which don't attack the actual cipher but the physical side effects of its implementation. An error in system design or execution can allow such attacks to succeed. Attackers may also attempt to break a targeted cipher through cryptanalysis, the process of attempting to find a weakness in the cipher that can be exploited with a complexity less than a brute-force attack. The challenge of successfully attacking a cipher is easier if the cipher itself is already flawed. For example, there have been suspicions that interference from the National Security Agency weakened the Data Encryption Standard algorithm, and following revelations from former NSA analyst and contractor Edward Snowden, many believe the NSA has attempted to subvert other cryptography standards and weaken encryption products. More recently, law enforcement agencies such as the FBI have criticized technology companies that offer end-to-end encryption, arguing that such encryption prevents law enforcement from accessing data and communications even with a warrant. The FBI has referred to this issue as "Going Dark," while the U.S. Department of Justice has proclaimed the need for "responsible encryption" that can be unlocked by technology companies under a court order.

Access Control Software

Access control is a security technique that regulates who or what can view or use resources in a computing environment. It is a fundamental concept in security that minimizes risk to the business or organization.

To secure a facility, organizations use electronic access control systems that rely on user credentials, access card readers, auditing and reports to track employee access to restricted business locations and proprietary areas, such as data centers. Some of these systems incorporate access control panels to restrict entry to rooms and buildings as well as alarms and lockdown capabilities to prevent unauthorized access or operations. Access control systems perform identification authentication and authorization of users and entities by evaluating required login credentials that can include passwords, personal identification numbers (PINs), biometric scans, security tokens or other authentication factors. Multifactor authentication, which requires two or more authentication factors, is often an important part of layered defense to protect access control systems. These security controls work by identifying an individual or entity, verifying that the person or application is who or what it claims to be, and authorizing the access level and set of actions associated with the username or IP address. Directory services and protocols, including the Local Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) and the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), provide access controls for authenticating and authorizing users and entities and enabling them to connect to computer resources, such as distributed applications and web servers. Organizations use different access control models depending on their compliance requirements and the security levels of information technology they are trying to protect.

The goal of access control is to minimize the risk of unauthorized access to physical and logical systems. Access control is a fundamental component of security compliance programs that ensures security technology and access control policies are in place to protect confidential information, such as customer data. Most organizations have infrastructure and procedures that limit access to networks, computer systems, applications, files and sensitive data, such as personally identifiable information and intellectual property. Access control systems are complex and can be challenging to manage in dynamic IT environments that involve on-premises systems and cloud services. After some high-profile breaches, technology vendors have shifted away from single sign-on systems to unified access management, which offers access controls for on-premises and cloud environments.

Access control is a process that is integrated into an organization's IT environment. It can involve identity and access management systems. These systems provide access control software, a user database, and management tools for access control policies, auditing and enforcement.

When a user is added to an access management system, system administrators use an automated provisioning system to set up permissions based on access control frameworks, job responsibilities and workflows. The best practice of "least privilege" restricts access to only resources that an employee requires to perform their immediate job functions. A common security issue is failure to revoke credentials and access to systems and data when an individual moves into a different job internally or leaves the company.

Firewall

A firewall is a network security device that monitors incoming and outgoing network traffic and decides whether to allow or block specific traffic based on a defined set of security rules. Firewalls have been a first line of defense in network security for over 25 years. They establish a barrier between secured and controlled internal networks that can be trusted and untrusted outside networks, such as the Internet. A firewall can be hardware, software, or both.

In the early days of the internet, when AT&T's Steven M. Bellovin first used the firewall metaphor, network traffic primarily flowed north-south. This simply means that most of the traffic in a data center flowed from client-to-server and server-to-client. In the past few years, however, virtualization and trends such as converged infrastructure have created more east-west traffic, which means that sometimes the largest volume of traffic in a data center is moving from server-to-server. To deal with this change, some enterprise organizations have migrated from the traditional three-layer data center architectures to various forms of leaf-spine architectures.

References: https://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/definition/biometrics https://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/definition/encryption https://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/definition/access-control https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/security/firewalls/what-is-a-firewall.html https://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/definition/firewall

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