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Four strategies to prevent data encryption from hijacking your network

Phil Trainor, Head of Security business, Ixia, Asia Pacific | Oct. 26, 2017
Knowing that many organisations pass encrypted traffic into their networks without full inspection, the bad guys use encryption to hide malware and launch attacks, effectively hijacking your network.


data encryption
Credit: Storyblocks 

While encryption can keep your network traffic safe from hackers and cybercriminals, it can also prevent your security and monitoring tools from seeing inside the packets crossing your network. Knowing that many organizations pass encrypted traffic into their networks without full inspection, the bad guys use encryption to hide malware and launch attacks, effectively hijacking your network. To keep defenses strong while limiting the risk of security breaches and data loss, you need to decrypt, examine, and re-encrypt all network traffic.


The burden of decryption

Devices for decryption must be powerful. Encryption algorithms are becoming longer and more complex to withstand hacking. A test done by NSS Labs several years ago found that moving from 1024- to 2048-bit ciphers caused an average performance drop of 81 percent on eight leading firewalls. However, SSL decryption does not need to be performed on a firewall. New strategies are available to offload decryption and send plain text to tools, enabling them to work efficiently and process more traffic. Here are four strategies to make decryption easier, faster, and cost-effective.


Strategy 1: Remove malicious traffic before decrypting



Alternatively, you can configure custom filters on your firewall to block specified IP addresses. Unfortunately, firewall filters must be manually configured and maintained, and there is a limit to how many filters can be created. The explosion of connected devices and compromised IP addresses outstrips the capabilities of firewalls. Plus, using the processing cycles on an advanced device like a firewall to make simple comparisons is not a cost-efficient way to block traffic.


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