We just migrated our application stack to IBM Cloud, and we're especially excited about IBM's Hyper Protect Crypto Services (HPCS). Thanks to IBM's cloud architecture and HPCS, Confection customer data is ultra secure from the moment it leaves a web property to the moment it hits a database, app, CRM, dataset, or other target endpoint.
To illustrate this in action, let's imagine the journey of a simple datapoint: a pageview, for example.
- A user interacts with a website. That generates a pageview event.
- This event data flows from the customer's server to her Confection account.
- Confection validates the event, and it enters the IBM private network.
- Behind the private network firewall -- which runs in an IBM data center using their hardware and chips -- HPCS caches and encrypts the event data.
- From there, the event data is available (for 24 hours) in the customer's account API, ready to go to whichever endpoint(s) the customer likes: a database, one of our native integrations, &c.
To access this event data, a threat actor would need to do the following:
- Gain access to the IBM network
- Bypass our application security measures (eg., admin passwords)
- Use (and pay for) a quantum computer to attempt to decrypt the data
Since we only cache the data for 24 hours, the threat actor would need to do all this within that timeframe. This is a technical impossibility. Here's why:
Data encrypted using traditional standards like AES would take classical computers trillions of years (and billions of times more energy than the entire world consumes in a single year) to decrypt: much longer than 24 hours, much longer than the age of the entire universe, in fact (13.7 billion years). Current quantum computers would still need millions of years to break even a medium-security, 128-bit AES key. However, as quantum technology advances – and this timeframe theoretically drops to a matter of months and then days and then hours – HPCS keeps Confection data encrypted in a future-proofed way via quantum-safe keys, which resist decryption by quantum computers.
Migrating to IBM Cloud and HPCS represents a major gain for our customers. The process allowed us to amplify our security posture, take complete control over our infrastructure, and benefit from unparalleled computing power. Now, we can confidently say no one generates better data from web properties than our customers do themselves. And no one secures their digital marketing data better than they do themselves.
Want the full story about our migration to IBM Cloud and Hyper Protect Crypto Services? See this post on the Confection blog.