Venafi has announced the results of a survey of 296 IT security professionals on encryption backdoors that was conducted July 22-27, 2017 at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas.
According to the survey, the majority of IT security professionals believe encryption backdoors are ineffective and potentially dangerous, with 91% saying cybercriminals could take advantage of government-mandated encryption backdoors.
In addition, 72% of the respondents do not believe encryption backdoors would make their nations safer from terrorists.
“Giving the government backdoors to encryption destroys our security and makes communications more vulnerable,” said Kevin Bocek, chief security strategist for Venafi.
“It’s not surprising that so many security professionals are concerned about backdoors; the tech industry has been fighting against them ever since global governments first called for unrestricted access.”
“We need to spend more time protecting and supporting the security of our machines, not creating purposeful holes that are lucrative to cybercriminals.”
Additional findings from the Venafi survey include:
- Only 19% believe the technology industry is doing enough to protect the public from the dangers of encryption backdoors.
- 81% feel governments should not be able to force technology companies to give them access to encrypted user data.
- 86% believe consumers don’t understand issues around encryption backdoors.
Encryption backdoors create vulnerabilities that can be exploited by a wide range of malicious actors, including hostile or abusive government agencies.
Billions of people worldwide rely on encryption to protect critical infrastructure, including global financial systems, electrical grids and transportation systems, from cybercriminals who steal data for financial gain or espionage.
(Learn More. Why do we spend more on protecting users and passwords than on protecting machine identities? Courtesy of Venafi and YouTube)
Venafi is a cybersecurity market leader in machine identity protection, securing connections and communications between machines.
Venafi protects machine identity types by orchestrating cryptographic keys and digital certificates for SSL/TLS, IoT, mobile and SSH.
Venafi provides global visibility of machine identities and the risks associated with them for the extended enterprise — on premises, mobile, virtual, cloud and IoT — at machine speed and scale.
Venafi puts this intelligence into action with automated remediation that reduces the security and availability risks connected with weak or compromised machine identities while safeguarding the flow of information to trusted machines and preventing communication with machines that are not trusted.
