Friday, May 13, 2011

Apple iPad Security: How To Be Secure

Have you ever wondered just how secure your Apple iPad was, well according to research undertaken by Kurt Marko (Information Week) your device sports some surprisingly robust security features.

When companies rollout their tablets to the consumer market, issues such as support for automated provisioning, network security, local data protection and centralized configuration management are sometimes over-looked or lost in the barrage of information that comes out on the product.

Whilst the Apple iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch do not at this time equal the BlackBerry when it comes to enterprise-grade management tools, they do contain some astonishingly tough security features. Incorporated within the iPad are the latest Wi-Fi security standards, like WPA2 personal and enterprise.

The iPad also offers a multitude of VPN protocols, including Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol, Cisco IPSec and Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol. There is also support for SSL VPNs by way of third-party apps from the likes of Juniper, Cisco and F5 Networks, so the data in motion on the iPad is well protected.

Kurt goes on to add that the data at rest, the flash drive partition for application and user data, is encrypted with AES-256 by means of an embedded hardware key, which can be strengthened by salting (similar to that of Unix passwords) with the Apple device’s screen-lock passcode. To see Kurt’s full article visit Information Week.

Has this information set your mind at ease? Will you be taking any precautionary measures to tighten your iPad’s security even further?