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The use of encryption can have adverse effects on incident response and incident

ID: 3892146 • Letter: T

Question

The use of encryption can have adverse effects on incident response and incident investigations; however, from a security standpoint, encryption is a major component in network confidentiality. Present your argument for or against an "universal key" which would allow investigators the ability to decrypt data for an investigation. State your position and back-up your stance with 5 or 6 sentences supporting your stance from information you found in related cases or arguments made in online publications. Do not plagiarize, use your own words when presenting. requirements for these post 200 - 300 words and proper citation.

Explanation / Answer

The term encryption refers to the action of disguising information so that it can be recovered easily by the persons who have the key, but is highly resistant to recovery by persons who do not have the key.

Encryption doesn’t actually defend unauthorized access to sensitive information rather it maintains the security factor that the information gained by unauthorized access doesn’t actually be useful to the intruder unless provided with a secuity key to decrypt the content.

There are two basic types of data that encryption is designed to protect:

Data at rest (data stored in computer, hard drive, or database) and data in transit(data transfer from browsers, in email, or to the cloud)

In both the cases encryption makes our data safe from intuders

By the increase of usage of data communication technologies and the increase of internet users more than ever, encryption has become a basic necessity to information security and privacy, ranging from individuals to corporate giants.

Most of the data encrytion techniques are virtually unbreakable and most of the encryption algorithms provide strong security and robustness such that it takes around hundreds of years to decode the information without the decryption key,for some extent it is pretty much useful bu on the other hand,it will become a complication in investigation of serious crimes resulting in confrontation of law enforcement and can threaten public safety in some cases which can have adverse effects on the national security.

even though advancement of information security is a good sign of technological development,it is adisable to enforce robust encryption techniques where the information is extremely valuable and security of such data is considered as a vital factor.

There are several encryption algorithms which provide robust security features and availabilty of such encryption methods for general purpose data encryption ultimately cripples the ability to investigate severe crimes and prevention of terrorist activities.

Such strong encryption techniques will allow violent gangs,drug-peddlers,spies and other such criminals to communicate about their conspiracies and anarchist activities without any fear of their being revealed to the security authorities.Thus this causes a vulnerability of law enforcement in criminal activities as it inhibits the ability of national security authorities to investigate thoroughly by losing the infomation being un-cracked .This resulting in the investigation being unsolved and the investigators need to await for several years until the technology to decode such evidences comes into existence.

For this reason it is advisable to provide a balanced solution for this problem as it is concerned with the national security and law enforcement issues by maintaining a UNIVERSAL KEY so that it becomes handy for investigators for the purpose of investigation.In this approach, the decryption key is maintaianed at a trusted key recovery agent who is responsible for centrally maintaing the keys of alll the users of an information system like a website or a database.

this trusted key recovery agent could be bank or a company or any other organisation who has a soverign right to provide the key to the investigation on-demand of authorities when law enforcement is needed to decrypt the information like files or any other communicatiopnn activities like e-mails,chats etc.,related to a criminal activity.This approach could be very useful to stop the progress of a crime or to avoid recurrence of such criminal activities by providing a timely decryption of the data(information) with the help of the key acquired from the trusted recovery agent.The trusted key recovery agent should maintain a data access policy that the recovery of the key should be done only for the investigation purpose and only when there is a high level of threat to an individual or an organisation or a nation

Most of the software products these days that implement strong and unbreakable encryption methods doesn't provide a immediate decryption for investigation purpose resulting in a lineage to increase of criminal activities.So, Universal Key is the only solution to law enforcement authorities to fight against crime and terrorism.