DriveHQ.com has supported AES 256-bit encryption with 2048-bit SSL certificate and TLS 1.2, the military grade security standard.

While 128-bit AES encryption is still very secure now, it may become vulnerable in the future. With new computing technologies such as cloud computing, parallel computing, network computing, and advancements in cryptography, it is possible to create a super computer to uncover the vulnerabilities of each encryption algorithm. With this in mind, it is interesting to check what encryption technologies companies use.

First, let's take a look at DriveHQ.com in a web browser (Internet Explorer)

As you can see, the address bar is green (safe), and it displays DriveHQ's company name next to the Lock icon. If you click the browser's File menu and select Properties, you can see:

Other web browsers are similar, e.g., in Firefox, it displays as follows:

As you can see, DriveHQ uses 256-bit encryption with TLS 1.2 and 2048-bit key. Also, DriveHQ uses an Extended Validation SSL (EV-SSL) Certificate. EV-SSL certificates are more secure as the certificate vendors take extra steps to validate an organization. EV-certificates are valid for only 1-2 years, so they are unlikely to be compromised; moreover, EV-SSL certificates can only be used for one DNS name (common name), they cannot be used as a wild-card certificate. Thus, it is not possible to use an EV-SSL certificate for other purposes.

Now, let's take a look at a few big banks:

Bank of America also uses EV-SSL certificate. let's check the SSL protocol and encryption length:

We can see that Bank of America uses 128-bit encryption. 

Now let's check Chase Bank:

It turns out that Chase Bank also uses an EV-SSL certificate with 128-bit encryption.

Let's check our competitors' websites:

As you can see, both Dropbox and Box use 128-bit encryption with a regular SSL certificate. Interestingly, they both use TLS 1.2. The browser address bar is not green and the company information is not available next to the lock icon.

Conclusion

It seems 128-bit encryption is still in the mainstream as some major banks are using it. This being said, security is extremely important to a cloud service provider. While cracking a 128-bit key is extrenmely hard, cracking a 256-bit key is 10,000,000,000,...000 times harder. Using 256-bit encryption requires more computing power on the server side, this might be one of the reasons that many companies have not moved to 256-bit encryption. At DriveHQ, we are keen to make our system as secure or even more secure than major banks; using 256-bit encryption and EV-SSL is just one of such efforts.