In the spirit of the holistic vision of Kubrick and collaborator Arthur C. Clarke, we find that no single development dominates eWEEK Labs' expectations for IT innovation in 2001. We aren't even tempted to propose a facile label such as "Year of Wireless" or "Year of Convergence," though many such labels will surely vie for enterprise mind share.
Instead, we see continued impressive progress on many complementary fronts in this 2001 tech odyssey.
Growing network capacity will invite richer media streams and enable more complex transactions. Business and entertainment activities will generate floods of records and will demand the creation and distribution of oceans of data, requiring vast storage investments (with 64-bit systems to track it all). Wireless connectivity and growing network dependence will elevate concerns regarding integrity and privacy.
The technologies that we examine in this special report solve pressing enterprise problems, create new problems of their own and play cooperative roles in curing each other's side effects. We hope you'll find this a useful watch list, as well as a wish list, as you enter the 21st century.
Tech item 1: AES
A code-breaking scheme that takes only 1 second to defeat today's DES would need 149 trillion years to crack a 128-bit implementation of the forthcoming AES. But even as strong encryption becomes the immune system of both e-businesses and personal transactions, every enterprise IT decision maker should understand the many factorsââ,¬"not just strengthââ,¬"that went into selecting the proposed Advanced Encryption Standard algorithm called Rijndael.
On strength alone, Rijndael was not even the leading contender among the five finalists for adoption as AES, but the mathematics of all modern encryption schemes are robust to the point of overkill.
In most cases, the chance that hardware costs or software overheads will lead to weak implementations is a far greater risk than cryptanalytic attacks. Rijndael has an important edge, therefore, with its economical use of both memory and processing power.
The royalty-free Twofish algorithm (also an AES candidate), more secure and nearly as economical, will be protecting many users through its incorporation into renowned cryptographer and privacy advocate Phil Zimmerman's PGP 7.0 (which Zimmerman now plans to extend with a Rijn dael option, because AES adoption means that Rijndael must also become freely available). Major enterprisesââ,¬"and perhaps national governmentsââ,¬"may prefer to license the computationally extravagant but apparently airtight MARS.
All crypto users, however, must recognize that protection is not so much a question of "how strong" as "how long." If data has only transient value, the present DES (Data Encryption Standard) or the widely used Triple DES may still suffice; if privacy is desired for decades after interception of encrypted data, 256-bit keys and other AES options belong in the arsenal of enterprise data defenders.
ââ,¬"Peter Coffee
