FIPS and How It Helps Your Business

The Federal Information Processing Standard is a globally recognised standard developed to define best practices for encryption for digital data. These standards require that data is encrypted while:

  1. In use (plugged into your computer and files accessed)
  2. In motion (in a laptop bag while travelling)
  3. At rest (unplugged from your computer)

Failure of any of these three elements will result in a product/service which is not fully encrypted and vulnerable to attacks and unlawful access.

Why is FIPS important? In 2014, over 81 million records were lost or compromised from big brands such as Target, Home Depot and JP Morgan. In this statistic, over 75% of these breaches were related to business and health care professionals, with health care responsible for 42% despite regulations. (Source: Globo PLC).

With health care data in particular, this data extends beyond the financial numbers you’d find in a regular business. This data represents every detail that doctors, specialists and professors have collected relating to patients. This data is incredibly important to remain secure, as medical data will often contain compromising details consented by their patients to remain confidential.  Individuals can face $420,000 for breaches in Medical data, and $2.1 Million for businesses (Source: MIPS)

The FIPS regulation focuses on encrypting data, random number generation and hashing. Through a combination of these protocols, FIPS certified products are trusted by police departments, hospitals, universities and major corporations globally.

We offer two different types of FIPS certification with our products: FIPS 197 and FIPS 140-2. The FIPS 197 protocol analyses the algorithms used to encrypt the data, while FIPS 140-2 is more advanced. With FIPS 140-2, the tamper-proof design of the circuit board has been approved, along with the data encryption. This protocol inspects not only the algorithms, but the physical elements of the drive to ensure it is rigorously tested for digital and physical tampering.

What is AES 256-Bit Hardware-based encryption?

The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256-Bit is the most secure method for encrypting your data. This is a required standard for FIPS certification. In FIPS-approved USBs, encryption occurs on the AES chip immediately upon data transfer. Currently, no weaknesses have been found to affect AES, beyond finding the right key. However, it would take 1 trillion computers, testing 1 billion keys per second, for 2 billion years to find the right key. It would also take the worlds fastest supercomputer, TaihuLight, running an impressive 100 petaFLOPs, millions of years to crack a single AES 256-bit deployment (Source: BitMicro).

FIPS and AES Encryption are what stands between you and a potential data breach. The needs for encrypting your data should be at the forefront of any business handling digital data, which is essentially every professional in the modern world. SecureUSB is dedicated to providing you with the best FIPS-certified products in Australia, so you can feel safe transferring and storing your secure documents.

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