“Industry-Standard Encryption” Isn’t an Answer: What to Ask Instead

“We use industry-standard encryption” sounds reassuring and says almost nothing.

It doesn’t name an algorithm. It doesn’t say where the encryption is applied or what it protects. It doesn’t say when it was last reviewed. It’s the security equivalent of “we take your safety seriously,” a sentence built to sound complete while committing to nothing specific enough to check.

To be fair to the vendors who give this kind of answer, it’s rarely a deliberate dodge. Often it means nobody at that vendor has ever been asked the question specifically enough to need a better one. Which is itself useful information. If a vendor can’t immediately name their encryption method, that’s a signal about their own internal visibility, not just their communication style.

This maps directly onto the CBOM entry from part 3. A vendor giving a genuinely useful answer is essentially handing you a plain-language version of that record, whether they call it that or not.

1. 01

   The specific algorithm, not a category. “RSA-2048,” not “strong encryption.”

2. 02

   Where it's applied. Data in transit, data at rest, and authentication are often handled differently, and a good answer distinguishes between them instead of treating encryption as one blanket fact.

3. 03

   What it protects. Customer PII, payment data, and internal logs don't carry the same stakes, and a vendor who can name what's covered has clearly looked.

4. 04

   Whether it's been recently reviewed, or is running on a configuration set years ago and never revisited.

5. 05

   An honest gap, if one exists. A vendor who names a known weakness and a real timeline to fix it is giving you a far more trustworthy answer than one claiming everything is already perfect.

Here’s a distinction worth having in mind even at this stage, before the next post goes further into it. Some of what a vendor tells you can be independently confirmed, by looking directly at their code, their configuration, or their running systems. Some of it can’t be confirmed that way, and comes down to trusting that the vendor answered honestly.

Neither kind of answer is worthless. A vendor’s own honest self-report is still far better than silence. But they’re not the same thing, and knowing which kind of answer you’re looking at changes how much weight it should carry in your own assessment.

A checkable answer is worth more than a confident one.

So once you have a genuinely specific answer, checkable or not, where does it actually live, and how do you use it day to day? That’s the practical question this whole series has been building toward, and it’s exactly where the next post goes.