Encrypting manufacturing data
Steve Scheiber, Contributing Technical Editor -- Test & Measurement World, 7/1/2004
Contract manufacturers often complain that—for fear of disclosing proprietary information—customers often refuse to reveal exactly how their products work. The customers' skittishness is understandable.
A large contract manufacturer generally handles numerous strikingly similar products bearing brand names from companies in fierce competition with one another. OEMs are merely trying to protect their only edge in the marketplace. Each OEM expects that his or her product will be superior to the others.
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A standard encryption algorithm. |
To combat these real fears, both OEMs and CMs are increasingly turning to encryption—at least for all data that travels in public spaces. A number of highly effective software products directly address this need. Examples include the Encryption-Plus family of products from PC Guardian and SecureDoc from WinMagic.
If you are looking into encryption, beware of some of the less obvious pitfalls. Encrypting only files is far less effective than encompassing whole disks and partitions. Even if all of your files are encrypted, swap files, fragments of deleted files, and other operating-system artifacts remain vulnerable. Scrambling the entire disk, on the other hand, solves that problem. And today's fast computers can generally keep any performance penalty of encrypting and decrypting on the fly to only a few percent at most—not a great sacrifice if it helps you to sleep at night.
Encryption algorithms should be standard and easy to understand (rather than easy to break). Some software vendors offer very impressive proprietary algorithms that they claim to be more effective than ones that are accepted by industry organizations. Still, 19th century cryptographer Auguste Kerckhoff emphasized that the security of a cipher lies not with the secrecy of the algorithm, but with the secrecy of the key—password, hardware fob, fingerprint, or other biometric agent.
Relying on contract manufacturing is a little like putting all your eggs in one basket. But as Mark Twain said more than a hundred years ago: "Watch that basket!"
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National Instruments has announced a substantial upgrade to its family of LabView graphical development projects. LabView 7.1 extends the product's Express technology to include automated instrumentation and real-time applications. The new release also introduces advanced execution timing and graphical debugging for low-level control and visibility of real-time execution. 
