You've invested in firewalls, virus checking, and strong encryption to protect your digital assets. But you've still got a single point of compromise. That's why you need Nightingale™, the new secret-splitting technology from RSA Laboratories.
ABOUT NIGHTINGALE: Nightingale™ is a security technology that is designed to protect all types of sensitive data against both internal and external threats. This includes personal information used for self-service password management and employee provisioning, consumer and healthcare data, credit-card numbers, cryptographic keys, and customer records. Drawing on RSA Laboratories' new secret-splitting technology, Nightingale technology is designed to be easily integrated into application software as a server module for the back-end of any network. It is intended to add a powerful extra layer of defense to the applications you build. Nightingale technology will be introduced into future versions of the RSA Security family of products.
"Protecting sensitive information is a continuing challenge for each new generation of business applications. Nightingale offers CIOs a major new paradigm that addresses the need to safeguard sensitive information while supporting Web access."
- CTO Atalla Security Products of HP and pioneer in banking security technology
THE THREAT: If you're running or building applications for a conventional server, then you've got a problem: It's called a single point of compromise. What does this mean? An attacker compromising just that one server - getting root access, for instance - can seize all its privileges and the data it manages. Even strong encryption and secure (FIPS 140) hardware don't solve this basic problem. That's because a hacker compromising a server gets the same access to keys or hardware as the server itself. All too often, viruses, Trojan horses, inside attackers, and hackers exploiting software bugs are able to punch through the outer layers of defense on enterprise networks. With a single point of compromise, the inner defensive layers of a network could be too weak to protect the digital assets of your enterprise or customers.
HOW NIGHTINGALE WORKS: Nightingale is a technology that does away with single points of compromise in a network. With Nightingale, sensitive data is cryptographically distributed across two locations - the Nightingale module/server and an application server. This process is known as secret-splitting. A hacker, insider, Trojan horse, or virus that compromises either location gets no access at all to sensitive data. Sensitive data is recombined only temporarily when and where needed - on a client, for instance; and in many cases data is not combined at all, but is used only in split form. Most importantly, thanks to its special architecture and cryptographic design, the Nightingale server/module is better protected from Web-based threats and insider attacks than an ordinary server. In other words, Nightingale more than doubles the security of the data it protects.
