4: Encryption

The key part of the above quote is the final clause of the first sentence, “for free people.” We are in the midst of a transformational period with the increased adoption of strong encryption and related trends such as the protocol stack evolution, enabling new architectural patterns for security management to emerge. New architectural patterns can simplify management, while reducing the threat surface and human resource requirements shifting threat prevention to the source of hardware and software. This has the potential to disrupt markets, but ultimately improve the overall security posture for organizations of all sizes. This chapter will walk through the benefits of a data-centric security model and enumerate the security and encryption controls that can be used to harden infrastructure and reduce the attack surface. It will also consider where these controls may be best applied, what developments are needed for universal deployment, and where these controls may be disruptive and why.