UK IT professionals are concerned about digital certificates and encryption keys. Many don’t know how many their organisations possess or even where some are stored. All of them think these assets are now under attack.
These are the findings of the report for US key and certificate management firm Venafi, which crunched the views of 2,300 IT professionals from the US, Australia, France, Germany, with 499 from the UK.
Once the bedrock of security, digital certificates and encryption keys now evoke anxiety. This is perhaps not surprising given the growing number of attacks in which they have been compromised or undermined in a more general way by vulnerabilities such as last year’s Heartbleed.
The average organisation in the UK tended to have 25,500 keys and certificates, with IT staff saying they had no idea where all of this was kept.
Alluding to a famous Black Hat presentation from 2013, many now feared some kind of ‘crypto apocalypse’, the idea that there might come a time in the relatively near future when the factoring algorithms underlie today’s encryption systems crumble in the face of encryption-cracking systems.
It sounds far-fetched but in truth today’s IT teams have more practical worries to occupy them before they start pondering alarming thought experiments designed by mathematicians.
The use of encryption keys and to some extent digital certificates has expanded, making their management incredibly difficult.
Every business and government rely upon cryptographic keys and digital certificates to operate. Without the trust established by keys and certificates, we’d be back to the Internet ‘stone age’ – not knowing if a website, device, or mobile application can be trusted.
The general sense of worry does seem justified, however. Last week Google announced that it had detected fake certificates for some of its domains, a small but telling example of the way this type of security is now under attack.
