At a time when data breaches and cyber threats continue to increase in frequency and sophistication, protecting critical data has become more important than ever. While traditional approaches that safeguard data at rest and in transit deliver protection, their use alone does not provide comprehensive security. The migration to the cloud and the proliferation of distributed and perimeterless network deployments require solutions that address security no matter where data is stored, transferred, or used.
Application-level data protection delivers a targeted and highly effective approach that safeguards data within the applications as they process the data. In this blog I will examine questions that customers often have regarding the application-level data protection approach. I will cover the main threats that these address, how application-level data protection neutralizes these, and address the questions customers often have on its implementation before concluding with practical recommendations.
Today’s Threat Landscape
Protecting critical data has always been a top-of-mind topic for businesses, particularly those processing sensitive details such as confidential, private, and payment information. According to the findings of the latest Data Threat Report, 93% of enterprises are reporting significant increases in threats1. As data storage and data processing environments have become more distributed with increased cloud adoption, traditional perimeter security approaches to data protection are no longer effective. Increased sophistication of attacks using phishing and malware have created greater awareness, and recent geopolitical tensions have added urgency to an already complex landscape. Growing threats and shifts in the type and severity of attacks have also created a more vigilant and forceful regulatory environment which is dictating how enterprises are rethinking their approach to data security. The existing threat landscape and new technologies and approaches are shaping how customers develop their data security strategies and creating new questions on how to best apply different approaches to data security.
Components of Application-Level Approach
Application-level data protection secures data anywhere it resides – at rest, in transit, and in use. To do this, it relies on different techniques that protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data including encryption, tokenization, masking, and hashing. Access controls further protect the data by defining who and/or what can access the data for different purposes. Encryption ensures that data is unreadable to unauthorized entities. Tokenization replaces data with representative configurable character blocks, and masking hides or blanks out sensitive areas within data fields to reduce the risk of exposure and potential compromise. Hashing mechanisms ensure that changes to data fields can be accounted for and easily detected to ensure integrity.
Strong access controls include mechanisms such as multi-factor and role-based user authentication to validate that individuals and/or entities accessing the data are indeed who or what they say they are. These features plus logging and monitoring capabilities, ensure that detailed records of actions taken within applications are maintained to help detect, identify, alert, and respond to irregular activity.
What Customers Want to Know
Application-level data protection until now had been considered hard to implement and costly, particularly for organizations with many applications to secure. Integration issues had been a significant detractor as typically, its use required significant changes to already deployed application software. The need for specialized skills and resources further added to the challenge. This perception has changed as innovative solutions enable organizations to centrally define the data protection policies they need to implement, enforce, and monitor easy-to-use, robust, and comprehensive security.
Given the benefits that application-level data protection now offers, customers often have questions about its capabilities. Examining these questions sets aside misconceptions and ensures better understanding of available deployment options. The following questions are answered in light of the capabilities offered by Prime Factors’ EncryptRIGHT solution, a leading data security platform that simplifies application-level data protection.
1. What are the main advantages of application-level data protection?
Application-level data protection offers significant advantages over other approaches by abstracting or separating data protection details from the applications and providing complete separation between security and application programming. This enables granular control over which users and applications can access sensitive data and how the data is used – a capability that is not possible with other at rest and in transit approaches. By protecting data within the context of the applications, security measures can be tailored to the specific risks and requirements of the applications. Protecting data at the application layer also ensures that the data remains safe regardless of its location, reducing exposure and ensuring it is only accessible through the application itself, which further minimizes the risks of interception.
2. How are different Data Protection Policies (DPPs) configured and enforced within a customer’s client applications?
DPPs are centrally defined and securely communicated to all instances protecting data. Being able to centrally manage and automatically synchronize DPPs wherever they are used also facilitates how these are managed across the deployment.
3. How is high availability implemented across the set of applications where the DPPs are established?
High availability is delivered through redundancy, by having multiple instances of the software. A Primary Server, which serves as the centralized policy server, typically has a dedicated Redundant Server that automatically backs up all of the DPPs and administrative configurations of a deployment to take over the role of a Primary in case of an unrestorable outage. Expansion Servers, which allow for centralized data protection services to be delivered through Web API calls, are deployed in multiples, often across more than one data center or environment, to provide extra data security processing capacity and redundancy. Clients can natively match the redundancy built into any application by deploying locally on every server that a given application runs.
Every instance, irrespective of the deployment model, is automatically synchronized to ensure that all DPPs are kept up to date. Policy information, such as key rotation, can be pre-scheduled so that instances can continue to perform data protection services without ever communicating with the Primary Server, until DPP changes are needed. This approach ensures robust scalability and redundancy even while maintaining simplified centralized control.
4. What other forms of data protection besides encryption can be leveraged at the application layer?
Other data protection techniques leveraged at the application layer include format preserving encryption (FPE), tokenization (random, format-preserving, or format-targeting), and masking. FPE is a form of encryption that, unlike traditional encryption, maintains the character count of the ciphertext the same as the original plaintext input. Tokenization replaces the original plaintext with a unique representative value, and format targeting produces specific length tokens not tied to the length of the original plaintext data. Format targeting is useful when applications need to accommodate specific field lengths and encryption may cause excess character count. Lastly, masking is used to hide either parts or the whole plaintext from the view of different users depending on their access rights to the data.
5. How do you prevent tokens from being re-utilized when using short lengths format- targeted tokens?
Tokenization relies on a pool of random representative characters so the smaller the length of the token, the greater the probability of ending up with a repeated token and the smaller the number of unique tokens available. This is a detail to keep in mind when using the technique to produce short length tokens. However, tokens can also be set to be single use so they cannot be repeated within the application.
6. How is the DPP made available to the application it is protecting?
The application needing to secure data does not need to have the DPP delivered to it per se, it only needs to make a call to the DPP to perform the cryptographic function(s) required for protecting the data. EncryptRIGHT synchronizes DPPs with each server instance supporting an application. Synchronization includes the secure transfer of DPP records to the instance, a process carried out through an encrypted channel. As the application simply calls the DPP externally, this removes the need for (and complexity related to) the application to interweave or even understand the details of the data security process.
7. How is symmetric encryption different from tokenization?
Symmetric encryption uses an algorithm and a key to scramble plaintext data into unreadable ciphertext. The same key is used to decipher the encrypted text and recover readable plaintext. Tokenization on the other hand, uses representative random values. Plaintext is paired with a randomly generated representative value or token and a look-up table is maintained inside a vault together with the encrypted plaintext. To reverse the process, the look-up table is again accessed to find the associated plaintext value. When one tokenizes a set of characters, the process can be set to produce tokens of specific types (i.e., alphanumeric, numeric, or random characters).
8. What is the difference between vaulted and vaultless tokenization?
Vaulted tokenization uses a controlled access repository (the vault) to store an encrypted copy of the plaintext data and the associated tokens in a look-up table. Vaultless tokenization does not depend on the use of this protected repository. In a vaultless process, encryption is used to generate the token by encrypting the plaintext data. Therefore, a token vault is not required since detokenization only needs to decrypt the token.
9. Where does tokenization occur; is it at the client application or at the server where the DPP is maintained?
In vaulted tokenization, the tokenization is done at the Primary, Redundant, or Expansion Server that has been designated as a tokenization server and therefore connected to the token vault. In vaultless tokenization, the tokenization can take place at any EncryptRIGHT instance. The former approach can reduce exposure and help with the scope of certain auditing requirements imposed by regulatory mandates.
10. How are the keys used for encryption and tokenization protected?
Keys used to encrypt plaintext data and/or protect token vaults are all protected in a Security File that is encrypted with a master key.
Practical Recommendations and Way Forward
Considering increasing threats and sophistication of attacks, the time for application-level data protection is now. Application-level data protection is a critical component of a comprehensive data security strategy. By focusing on the data within the application, organizations can achieve a higher level of protection than with traditional methods alone. Careful planning, ongoing vigilance, and investment in the right tools will safeguard your most valuable asset—data—against the ever-evolving landscape of cyber threats. An investment in advanced solutions that let you define, apply, and enforce data protection policies will simplify how you secure data and facilitate auditing and compliance with regulations.
The right security strategy requires the right solutions. Prime Factors’ EncryptRIGHT enables organizations to quickly protect their most sensitive data across all critical applications, without costly, error-prone, and time-consuming reprogramming efforts. Prime Factors has been widely recognized by industry analysts covering the global data security platform (DSP) market. EncryptRIGHT ensures that enterprises’ sensitive data remains protected and is only accessible to authorized individuals and applications.
To learn more about application-level data protection, the unique features offered by Prime Factors’ EncryptRIGHT, and how it can help your organization stay one step ahead of data breaches and cyber threats, check out primefactors.com/data-protection/application-level-data-encryption for technical and architectural details. You can also experience the features and benefits of EncryptRIGHT for yourself by downloading a free trial.
[1] 2024 Data Threat Report, Thales CPL.
