Bob Caldwell
Sunday, 09 October 2005
 Our capacity to correspond across borders and boundaries once considered inviolable,
via the high powered astronomy telescope to the Internet is remaking our perceptive
of our place in the world. Our best ally is to have an encryption standard in
place for our pocket Pc or Symbian devices. This special submission article delves
into the topic of encryption... enjoy!Computer Scientist and software developers revealed a level of reality in which
events are instantaneously transmitted across the internet. Our capacity to correspond
across borders and boundaries once considered inviolable, via the high powered
astronomy telescope to the Internet is remaking our perceptive of our place in
the world. The smart phone and Internet have given us access to its inherent connectivity
in a candid way. Our biggest obstacle is to consider the whole spectrum of reality,
secrecy, mistrust, identity theft and theft of personal credit card information
obscuring of the truth creating suffering and impede our capacity to react properly
a lesson we have to learn. As we progress into the future and increase our capacity
to penetrate into the workings of the interconnected web, we need to come to a
solid understanding that are data can be stolen and manipulated.
There fore the best way to help oneself whether you are a small business person
running a business or a big corporation is to encrypt your data on your personal
computer as well as your mobile devices such as: Symbian, Palm or Pocket PC. A
Chicago based engineer, Daniel Bulley, 42 years old was a victim of identity theft.
It took him 8 weeks to find out that someone had charged $3000 on his credit cards
and $1000 in long distance telephone calls. He used the TransUnion credit agency
monitor report to check his credit report every month. In the end, Mr. Bulley
spent hundreds of dollars sending certified letters to close all his accounts
and forever traumatized by overseas hackers. Many financial institutions are attacked
daily by hackers and nasty people trying to get at the credit card numbers belonging
to their customer base.
We Are Being Called Upon To Change Our Behavior Our best ally is to have an encryption standard in place for our pocket Pc or
Symbian devices. If all your companys customer information was stored on your
device and someone or a competitor was able to successfully hack into your data,
what type of consequences would you be liable for from your companys perspective?
Encryption is one of those technologies we heard of for years In a competitive culture the idea of having your data stolen is a startling realization,
but we cannot afford to ignore it. By making your data unreadable to other hackers
and at the same time being able to access the data by authorized personnel is
a wise thing to do in this day and age. Experiencing a crisis of having your data
stolen fixes our attention on dysfunction and, at the same time, calls us to generate
insight to actually implement an encryption standard on our mobile devices. The
authorized personnel that receive the encrypted data have a specific key and software
to encrypt and decrypt the data once received. The encryption software uses mathematic
algorithms for converting the regular clear text that you see on this page to
cipher text and then back again to clear text. What is interesting is that the
encryption employs an intensive amount of energy from the CPU (the brain of your
computer) to execute the encryption and decryption process. As well, the bigger
the file or data being encrypted the longer the process takes. If the encryption
key is quite lengthy, it makes it more difficult for the encryption to be broken.
Leaving Aside Issues Of Privacy or Protection, HTTPS / SSL websites Is Important
When you visit a website and you would like to buy a service or product using
your credit card or paypal account, only input your credit card information if
the website uses HTTPS or SSL certificates. When you type in your personal information
on a website using SSL, an encrypted session is performed between your website
browser and the website you are buying the product or service from. Information
such as your password or credit card number and expiry date is encrypted
- at the time you have inputted your data
- en route while the data is being sent
- once it arrives at the destination as well
To make sure your purchase transaction will be encrypted please look for a closed
lock icon at the bottom of the Internet explorer browser. Most web browsers support
40bit and 128 bit encryption keys, today the standard is 125 bits. Companies have
explored the dilemmas, accept and integrate locally signed certificates installed
on each Pocket PC, Symbian or smart phone. In order for the handheld devices are
able to access secure internal company websites or the companys exhange 2003
server, companies use locally signed certificates.
Virtual Private Networks Use 3DES 3DES stands for triple data encryption standard and it is widely used by many
corporations. There are 3 different 56 bit keys that are utilized to encrypt the
sensitive data 3 times. 3DES also uses 168 bit key, which is long and tricky to
crack.
Advanced Encryption Standard Uses 128 bit blocks to encrypt data There are 3 different ways you can use AES encryption standard. You can encrypt
data with: AES128, AES256, AES384. This is what the government of the United States
uses as their official standard. They augment the key by 128 bit increments.
Blowfish encryption standard is widely adopted by software developers Blowfish is used by developers using Linux applications such as Secure shell
or (SSH). This encryption standard supports 512, 1024 bits and can be used on
32 bit operating systems. This new discovery or encryption solution is able to
encrypt and decrypt data the fastest compared to other encryption standards.
Wi-Fi Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) Is easily Broken The reason why I dont go to Wi-Fi Hotspots and input my personal information
on a website is because of all the encryption standards, WEP is the weakest and
easiest to hack open. WEP supports both 64 and 128 bit keys. Wired Protected Access
uses TKIP or WEP2 to give an integrity check to make sure that the encryption
keys are not easily corruptible.
Make Encryption A Regular Practice Of Your Life If you own a pocket pc 2002, windows mobile 2003, and windows mobile 2003 second
edition, feel free to install additional local and root certificates. If you own
a Windows Mobile 2003 or later device, Microsoft lets you use Wi-Fi connections
using WEP, WPA, EAP. Below are 4 different file encryption programs for your Pocket
PC. Microsoft has built in password protection every Pocket PC, however that doesnt
include file encrypted protection. Our willingness to install third party encryption
software programs is our best hope of being proactive to having our data stolen
by some hacker.
- Resco File Explorer - http://www.resco.net/pocketpc/explorer/default.asp You
will get a 128 bit file encryption, built in file viewer, network browser, and
windows registry editor
- Softwinters Sentry 2020 for Pocket PC - http://www.softwinter.com/ The nice
thing about this software is it can encrypt a volume of data or even an entire
storage card. In fact, the encrypted files will instantly lock if an unauthorized
person tries to access your data with a given specific amount of time.
- Applian PocketLock - http://www.applianmobile.com/pocketpc/pocketlock/index.php
You will be able to use up to a 168 bit key to encrypt your data as well as less
secure and faster PINs. If you like, download their 15 day free trial version
to see if it meets your standard.
- Pocket Privacy - http://www.pocketmind.com/pocketprivacy.htm You will be able
to hide your contacts, tasks, appointments, files and databases. You have to unlock
your private data in order to access it.
How many times have you transmitted data with sensitive information and wish
you had a way to encrypt your data? The current debate over whether to encrypt
of not encrypt your data is a case in point. Indicators of an increasing threat
of hackers accessing our data are obvious to the entire world, and yet not everyone
uses encryption software. Dont remain in status quo, I would heartily advise
you to install some type of encryption software on your Symbian, Palm or Pocket
PC device.
Cingular Wireless offers wireless internet access solutions for Nokia cell phones and Nokia Smart phones called Media Net.
This article is copyrighted (c)2005, Bob Caldwell
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