FAPSI AND THE INTERNATIONAL MARKET OF ENCRYPTION TECHNOLOGIES

Alexander Starovoitov, General of the Army
 

Russian tools use 256-bit or stronger encryption, i.e., the number of various keys is greater than 1077 and the cryptographic qualities of Russian-made equipment completely rules out data deciphering.

Information requirements have been growing rapidly, which objectively stimulates the intensive development of information and telecommunications technologies, opening up new possibilities for increasing management efficiency and working upon people's minds. In the United States, in the past five years, the information technologies market has reached eight percent of the gross domestic product and has ensured 25 percent of real economic growth. The information technologies industry has been growing twice as faster as other sectors of the U.S. economy.

GSM - a small-size user point of the GSM-900 celluar phone system, encrypting voice messages and other data

At the same time, information itself has become much more vulnerable, largely due to the breakneck advance of general-use information systems based on the so-called multilayer architecture of open system interaction, which, technically and economically, is quite justified. However, these systems have a common drawback - they do not have reliable protection against unauthorized access. Many problems have arisen as a result of the large scale integration of national information networks into international ones, such as the Internet. This network does not have reliable security to protect confidential information and is highly vulnerable to cyber attack.

This security problem is vital for all Internet protocols and services, causing considerable difficulty in ensuring identification and authentication for remote users and in establishing control over communication channels and routes and over the state of individual network elements. All these factors create good opportunities for creating false servers and message routers in the network, for replacing IP-link subjects, and for causing failures in the network's operation by submitting false Internet requests and thus increasing request queues.

National information and telecommunications systems are also vulnerable to cyber threats posed by both foreign intelligence agencies and various kinds of hackers. More and more hackers break into commercial and defense communications systems. Experts consider these attacks as a serious threat to national security. In many of those attacks hackers deliberately infected information systems with viruses, brought chaos into computer databases, changed codes and passwords and stole vital information. Experts estimate annual losses of U.S. companies from unauthorized break-ins by foreign rivals and the stealing of economic and technological information at billions of U.S. dollars.

The situation is aggravated by the accessibility and low prices of computer data interception devices. For example, according to Computerworld magazine, a set of mobile intercept post equipment, capable of downloading data from remote computer systems, costs not more than U.S. $400.

This is why any large scale introduction of information technologies in any country caring about its independence and security must rest on a state policy for protecting national information resources. Such protection can be efficiently ensured only by encryption technologies used to secure data and for other purposes. For example, users now widely use digital signatures to authenticate sent data. Signatures are authenticated with the help of encryption algorithms. This is done to authenticate users in information and telecommunications systems, to protect data senders or receivers against equipment failures, to prove the illegitimate nature of actions by users or network personnel, and for other purposes...full article is available for subscribes only