ISO 27799:2016

Regulation summary

Among the best practices called for in ISO 27799 are:

• Data access controls and managing privileged access;
• Cryptographic control of sensitive data
• Management and protection of encryption keys
• Recording and archiving “all significant events concerning the use and management of user identities and secret authentication information” and protecting those records from “tampering and unauthorised access”.²

Compliance summary

Thales can help you meet the standards in ISO 27799:2016 through:

• Access controls that let only credentialled users retrieve data
• Encrypting or tokenising data so that if it is stolen, it is meaningless and therefore useless to cybercriminals
• Centrally managing and securely storing encryption keys from across your organisation
• Protected security intelligence logs to identify irregular access patterns and breaches in progress

Access control

The CipherTrust Data Security Platform provides state-of-the-art user access control.

• Separation of privileged access users and sensitive user data. With the CipherTrust Data Security Platform, organisations can create a strong separation of duties between privileged administrators and data owners. CipherTrust Transparent Encryption encrypts files while leaving their metadata in the clear. In this way, IT administrators – including hypervisor, cloud, storage and server administrators – can perform their system administration tasks, without being able to gain privileged access to the sensitive data residing on the systems they manage.
• Separation of administrative duties. Strong separation-of-duties policies can be enforced to ensure one administrator does not have complete control over data security activities, encryption keys or administration. In addition, CipherTrust Manager supports two-factor authentication for administrative access.
• Granular privileged access controls. Thales’ solution can enforce very granular, least-privileged-user access management policies, enabling protection of data from misuse by privileged users and APT attacks. Granular privileged-user-access management policies can be applied by user, process, file type, time of day and other parameters. Enforcement options can control not only permission to access clear-text data, but what file-system commands are available to a user.

Data-centric protection

Thales protects the data itself through CipherTrust Transparent Encryption with integrated Key Management for data at rest, CipherTrust Application Data Protection, CipherTrust Tokenisation, and more. These techniques make the data meaningless and worthless without the tools to decrypt it.

Unified key management

CipherTrust Enterprise Key Management from Thales provides a robust, standards-based platform for managing encryption keys from disparate sources across the enterprise. It simplifies the management and administrative challenges around encryption key management to ensure that keys are secure and always provisioned to authorised encryption services.

Security intelligence logs

Thales lets the enterprise monitor and identify extraordinary data access. CipherTrust Security Intelligence logs are detailed management logs that specify which processes and users have accessed protected data. They specify when users and processes:

• Accessed which data, under which policies
• If access requests were allowed or denied
• Expose when a privileged user submits a command like 'switch users' in order to attempt to imitate the credentials of another user

Sharing these logs with a security information and event management (SIEM) platform helps uncover anomalous patterns in processes and user access, which can prompt further investigation.