Secure data starts at home

It can't be stated any more simply than this: Companies in the private sector are starting to be held to the same security standards as U.S. government agencies. So says InFocus contributor Arun Subarrao, the director of software engineering at LynuxWorks, who reports that Internet service providers, financial institutions and power companies are being forced to evaluate those of their operating systems and products that are part of the country's critical security infrastructure.

Indeed, recent virus attacks have shown there is a dire need for secure OSes that cannot be hacked or compromised, he writes. "Security breaches cost hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars. With the formation of the Department of Homeland Security, it will not be long before regulations are put in place mandating that companies evaluate the security level of their embedded-software products for system integrity, to ensure that security cannot be compromised."

The industry is reacting to this growing need to secure our computer "borders" with a slew of new technologies.

IDT's Misha Nossik maintains that application-level content security and content inspection require a standalone packet-classification system comprising a content inspection engine and a network search engine. His article explores the growing value of hardware, including programmable state machines and discrete coprocessors, in developing secure applications. Intel's John Beaton, meanwhile, argues that the security accelerator interconnect will soon evolve from PCI and PCI-X to PCI Express.

MagicQ's Michael LaGasse offers a quantum-computing approach-a type of cryptographic protocol in which the data is modified into a form unreadable to anyone but the intended audience. The fundamental part of any cryptographic protocol is the key, a string of random bits that are used to encode the data. LaGasse contends that a quantum-key distribution system solves many problems by allowing continuous regeneration of keys and a means by which to disseminate them with absolute security between remote locations via a dedicated fiber link.

These and other articles, both in print and online, make up this week's In Focus report on network security.