Encryption: the battle against hackers

Overview

Encryption is a powerful tool for protecting sensitive data. However, attackers can take advantage of the same security and privacy protections for their own gain.

As ransomware constantly makes headlines by having a clear impact on the organisations affected, it would be easy to think that is the only impact encryption has on defenders. Often overlooked is the effect encryption has on network security monitoring solutions, such as firewalls, intrusion detection/prevention systems (IDS/IPS) or Network Detection and Response (NDR) tools.

Join Dale Bowie, an IBM Software Architect and Master Inventor, for a look at the history of these tools monitoring network communications and a dive into the challenges and opportunities that encryption brings to this space. Can recent research into encrypted communications help manage this risk, or will organisations be forced to move backwards in privacy in order to improve their own security?

Learning outcomes

In this presentation, you will learn

• indicators of compromise could we identify and how could we trivially perform detections
• early encryption algorithms, with the rise of man-in-the-middle decryption and efforts to mitigate that
• connection fingerprinting techniques be used to gain some confidence or concern about a particular encrypted connection.