Nine out of ten network professionals see the invisibility of encrypted Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) traffic as a risk, a vendor-sponsored survey claims.
Compiled by Blue Coat Systems, the survey of European security and IT staff showed that 97% of respondents believe SSL is a major risk.
Another survey, of 300 US networking staff, found that 64% considered it difficult to comply with regulatory requirements while using SSL technology.
According to Blue Coat, the problem with SSL is its encryption, which sets up a secure tunnel between two points, usually one internal and the other — a web application, for example — sitting outside the user’s premises. Although the technology is widely used in secure remote access, a growing number of applications open SSL sessions on an informal basis, making control difficult.
Blue Coat is using the survey results to push its own solution to the problem, a proxying appliance that terminates traffic in such a way that it can be managed using defined policies.