The Ponemon Institute has released a white paper, What auditors think about Crypto (registration required). I downloaded and took a cursory look at their results. My summary of their report is “IT auditors rely on encryption, but key management can be really hard”. No shock there. A client passed along a TechTarget blog post where Larry Ponemon is quoted as saying auditors prefer encryption , but worded to make their study sound like a comparison between encryption and tokenization. So I dove deep into their contents to see if I missed something. Nope. The study does not compare encryption to tokenization, and Larry’s juxtaposition implies it is.

The quotes from the TechTarget post are as follows:

Encryption has always been a coveted technology to auditors, but organizations that have problems with key management may view tokenization as a good alternative

and

Tokenization is an up and coming technology; we think PCI DSS and some other compliance requirements will allow tokenization as a solid alternative to encryption.

and

In general auditors in our study still favor encryption in all the different use cases that we examined,

Which are all technically true but misleading. If you had to choose one technology over another for all use cases, I don’t know of a security professional who wouldn’t choose encryption, but that’s not a head to head comparison. Tokenization is a data replacement technology; encryption is a data obfuscation technology. They serve different purposes. Think about it this way: There is no practical way for tokenization to protect your network traffic, and it would be a horrible strategy for protecting backup tapes. You can’t build a VPN with tokenization – the best you could do would be to use access tokens from a Kerberos-like service. That does not mean tokenization won’t be the best way to secure data at rest security now or in the future. Acknowledging that encryption is essential sometimes and that auditors rely on it is a long way from establishing that encryption is better or preferable technology in the abstract. Larry’s conclusion is specious.

Let’s be clear: the vast majority of discussion around tokenization today has to do with credit card replacement for PCI compliance. The other forms of tokens used for access and authorization have been around for many years and are niche technologies. It’s just not meaningful to compare cryptography in general against tokenization within PCI deployments. A meaningful comparison of popularity between encryption and tokenization, would need to be confined to areas where they can solve equivalent business problems. That’s not GLBA, SOX, FISMA, or even HIPAA; currently it’s specifically PCI-DSS.

Note that only 24% of those surveyed were PCI assessors. They look at credit card security on a daily basis, and compare relative merits of the two technologies for the same use case. 64% had over ten years experience, but PCI audits have been common for less than 5. The survey population is clearly general auditors, which doesn’t seem to be an appropriate audience for ascertaining the popularity of tokenization – especially if they were thinking of authorization tokens when answering the survey.

Of customers I have spoken to, who want to know about tokenization, more than 70% intend to use tokenization to help reduce the scope of PCI compliance. Certainly my sample size is smaller than the Ponemon survey’s. And the folks I speak with are in retail and finance, so subject to PCI-DSS compliance.

At Securosis we predict that tokenization will replace encryption in many PCI-DSS regulated systems. The bulk of encryption installations, having nothing to do with PCI-DSS and being inappropriate use cases for tokenization, however, will be unchanged. At a macro level these technologies go hand in hand. But as tokenization grows in popularity, in suitable situations it will often be chosen over encryption. Note that encryption systems require some form of key management. Thales, the sponsor of Ponemon’s study, is a key vendor in the HSM space which dominates key management for encryption deployments.

Finally, there is some useful information in the report. It’s worth a few minutes to review, to look get some insight into decision makers and where funding is coming from. But it’s just not possible to make a valid comparison between tokenization and encryption from this data.

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