Going the open source route to encrypt enterprise data has its own potential pitfalls When Unisys CISO John Frymier came in to work on Friday, Sept. 6, the phones were ringing, and continued to ring all day. Customers were panicking over the news headlines of the day before. The NSA had cracked Internet encryption. The NSA was listening in to everything. European customers were especially concerned, he says. Fortunately, many of the headlines had been unnecessarily alarmist. “The earlier types of encryption, with 64 bits or less, the NSA has figured out how to brute force decrypt at least some of that traffic,” he says. “But the more modern, strong encryption, with 128 or 256 encryption units, they can’t decrypt that. And it bothers them no end” Customers can still trust it, he says. EncryptionOpen Source