Overcoming Obstacles: Encryption for Everyone!

Abstract

Confidentiality protection is a request not only for companies but also for private users. Nevertheless the vast majority of users and companies have not adopted strong mechanisms as encryption yet. Lack of awareness may be the reasons for this. But even those companies that know about their risks related to a violation of information confidentiality often abstain from using encryption. As encryption can be applied to different levels of applications it is too difficult for them to develop a coherent strategy including a consistent key management. Another reason is that easy to handle solutions are still missing.

However, companies and private users have no alternative than to integrate encryption mechanisms in their applications if they handle critical and personal related data. To select the appropriate solutions in a first step the specific protection requirements for the data-in-transit and data-at-rest have to be analysed to select the encryption mechanisms that fit to the needs.

Fraunhofer-Institute Secure Information Technology – SIT has tackled the problem and developed a PKI based encryption solution in particular for the target group of inexperienced users to provide them with keys and certificates and an easy to handle application: E4E – Encryption for Everyone.