In today’s era, data is the new oil. Digital information has become a crucial part of our lives as every second trillion bytes of data are being transferred, processed, or shared around the world. This exponential growth in data over the years has also increased its vulnerability to cyber-attacks.

According to the founder of Cybersecurity Ventures:

“Cybercrime is predicted to inflict global damages totaling $10.5 trillion USD annually by 2025.”

These statistics clearly show that in the following years, the number of cyber-attacks on organizations and enterprises will increase, which will lead to large amounts of revenue loss.

So, what measures can be taken to prevent your organization from being a victim of a cyber-attack?

In recent year data encryption has seen a rise as more and more organizations and enterprises move to secure their data with encryption methods that help counter this issue as they were facing all kinds of attacks on their data.

What is Data Encryption?

Data encryption is the process of converting your information from simple text to ciphertext to protect it from any kind of unauthorized access or breaches and people who have keys to that encryption can access it as people who try to access the data without the encryption key will see the data scrambled or unreadable.

It works when data is translated into some form of code with an encryption key that uses multiple types of algorithms, each of which differs by application and security.

So, what are the benefits of encrypting your data?

Benefits of Encrypting Your Data

Organizations that have implemented data encryption methods in their systems have secured their data from all kinds of cyber threats. Some of the Data Encryption benefits are as follows:

• Security - Encryption can help prevent data breaches during transfer and storage. Encrypted communication lines can allow sensitive data to be transferred without the risk of a security breach.
• Privacy - Most encryption types allow only verified access to encrypted data. Encryption can help ensure that only data owners or intended recipients read messages.
• Integrity - Encryption can help protect against data-manipulating attacks during transfer. Information manipulation can change a file's contents, type, and size. Data manipulators may choose to copy or delete files during transfer. Many industries, such as social media companies, require encryption to maintain a secure standard.
• Regulations - The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requires security features from health care providers. These regulations help protect patients' health care information online.

This gives us a brief idea about the benefits of data encryption, now let’s see the different methods through which data can be encrypted.

Different Methods Through Which Data Can Be Encrypted?

Data encryption can be done in several ways but the most widely used methods are symmetric and asymmetric methods. Let’s see how these two encryption methods differ from each other:

Symmetric Encryption

Symmetric encryption is where both the sender and receiver have the same pair of private keys to encrypt and decrypt their sensitive data. It is a private key encryption method.

The algorithms that are used in this symmetric encryption are Data Encryption Standard (DES) which uses a 64-bit long key. The other one is Advance Encryption Standard (AES) which uses a 256-bit long key.

Asymmetric Encryption

Asymmetric Encryption has two kinds of keys for the process. It combines a public key to encrypt the data and a private key to decrypt data explicitly. The benefit of such a kind of encryption is that the private key is only accessed by the server.

The algorithms that are used in this asymmetric encryption are Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA) which uses exponentiation and discrete logarithm. Another example is RSA which is based on the factorization of the product of two large primes.

Learn more about these Data Encryption algorithms here.

Types of Data Encryption

Data encryption can also be done while the data is at rest and in transit. Let’s look at how data is being encrypted in these states:

Encryption at Rest: Data stored in the system is at rest and is encrypted with 265-bit encryption. Data at rest is less vulnerable to an attack than data in transit.

Encryption in Transit - Data that is being shared, uploaded, or transferred to the data center is protected through Transport Layer Socket (TLS) protocol. TLS uses cryptographic modules to ensure that data is not intercepted in transit and the data center uses a hash check to verify whether the data is the same.

Learn more about Data Encryption States.

VIDIZMO Solution to Data Encryption For Law Enforcement Agencies

VIDIZMO Digital Evidence Management System is an IDC MarketScape recognized solution that helps law enforcement agencies to ingest, store, manage, analyze, and share digital evidence safely and securely.

VIDIZMO DEMS caters to the needs of public safety by providing law enforcement agencies and other organizations tons of features to help them make the whole process starting from evidence gathering, discovery process, and secure sharing to court presentation.

The Digital Evidence Management system is highly secure as it provides AES 256-bit data encryption at rest and in transit while providing complete autonomy over each portal. Also, an added layer of security is integrated with Single Sign-On (SSO) identity providers such as Azure Active Directory (AD), Okta, OneLogin, and others. You can assign role-based access to each portal user to prevent any unauthorized access to the evidence. Any kind of tampering or alteration done to the digital evidence can easily be detected SHA cryptographic hash value.

Besides what’s been mentioned, some of the key features that VIDIZMO DEMS provides are as follows:

• Evidence Security - Ensure the highest level of protection for your digital evidence using a robust set of security features and functions.
• Chain of Custody - Keeping your digital evidence untainted from ingestion to case closure.
• Evidence Sharing - Simplify Evidence Sharing Process with prosecutors & defense for competent court trial preparation.
• Redaction - Streamline your redaction to expedite investigations and put freed resources to better use.
• Deployment Options - VIDIZMO offers the flexibility to choose your own deployment model that fits your needs, budget & compliance requirements.
  
• Compliance - Leverage a consolidated evidence management system with features and functions that help you meet all your digital evidence compliance requirements.

And Much More!

Learn more about VIDIZMO DEMS Features.

VIDIZMO Digital Evidence Management System is FIPS-2 Compliant

VIDIZMO DEMS is FIPS 140-2 compliant and provides end-to-end data encryption using a cryptographic module. Using FIPS-compliant algorithms will eradicate the issues faced in enterprises like sensitive data exposure, key leakage, broken authentication, insecure session, and spoofing attack.

FIPS 140-2 standard contains four levels of security. With each level priority of data encryption increases.

Level 1 - Requires production-grade equipment and externally tested algorithms.

Level 2 - Adds requirements for physical tamper-evidence and role-based authentication. Software implementations must run on an Operating System approved to Common Criteria at EAL2.

Level 3 - Adds requirements for physical tamper-resistance and identity-based authentication.

Level 4 - This level makes the physical security requirements more stringent, requiring the ability to be tamper-active, erasing the contents of the device if it detects various forms of environmental attack.

For many organizations, requiring FIPS certification at FIPS 140 level 3 is a good compromise between effective security, operational convenience, and choice in the marketplace.

Learn more about FIPS-2 Compliance.

Conclusion

As the consumption and usage of data have risen exponentially, so have concerns about its safety and security. Customers' data are comprised daily by different kinds of cyber-attack which result in data loss or theft. So, the need of the hour is to secure the data with such kinds of encryption that are not easily compromised.

To learn more about VIDIZMO redacting tools or if you have any queries, feel free to get in touch with us or schedule a meeting with our sales representatives.