CISCO is offering up an experimental cipher which, among other things, could help preserve the anonymity of data in cloud environments. In putting what it calls "FNR" (Flexible Naor and Reingold) into the hands of the public ( http://blogs.cisco.com/security/open-sourcing-fnr-an-experimental-block-cipher/ ), CISCO says its work is currently experimental rather than production software.
The FNR specification, described here ( http://eprint.iacr.org/2014/421.pdf ) (PDF), explains that privacy of fixed-length fields (such as collected in NetFlow formats) is an emerging challenge for cloud providers, who collect lots of telemetry for analysis and don't want to change their field formats to encrypt the information.
(Score: 2) by juggs on Tuesday June 24 2014, @05:31AM
Wonderful, the implementation can be audited. Doesn't really help if the unencrypted payload is being snarfed by some evil chippery before hitting the encryption algorithm.
And from there it's turtles all the way down maaaan! :D