Operations
This section provides information on operations that the CTE Server Administrator performs on the CipherTrust Data Security Platform Service. These operations include registering CTE clients with the CipherTrust Data Security Platform Service, and protecting file system on a CTE client.
Registering Clients
Registration is the process of configuring a CTE client with a CipherTrust Data Security Platform Service. This process creates SSL certificates for further communication between the CipherTrust Data Security Platform Service and the CTE client.
Registering a CTE client with the CipherTrust Data Security Platform Service requires a registration token. Single registration token can be used to register any number of CTE clients. Refer to the CTE Agent Quick Start Guide specific to your platform for details.
The following diagram shows the process of registering CTE clients with the CipherTrust Data Security Platform Service:
Protecting Data on Clients
After registration, the client can communicate with the CipherTrust Data Security Platform Service, and is ready for data protection using CTE. This section describes how CTE GuardPoints, policies, and policy elements work together to encrypt file systems.
Refer to Common Scenarios for prerequisites and procedures to encrypt data in the most common scenarios.
GuardPoints
A GuardPoint specifies the path on the client that is to be protected with different access and encryption policies. GuardPoint is configured by specifying the guard path, policy, and other policy/path specific configuration parameters.
Refer to Managing GuardPoints for details.
Policies
A policy is the resource where all the access privileges and key configuration is done to achieve the required use cases. Policies are categorized as:
Refer to Creating Policies for details.
Standard Policies
Depending on the availability of data in GuardPoints, standard policies can be applied in two different scenarios.
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The GuardPoint does not contain any data. The data would be created after the GuardPoint is applied. These policies are also called production policies.
A sample production policy is shown below:
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The GuardPoint already contains data. The existing data is migrated to encrypted form by using the data transformation policy.
A sample data transformation policy is shown below:
After the data is migrated, unguard the data transformation policy, apply the standard policy with same key (as used by the data transformation policy). A sample standard policy applied after unguarding a data transformation policy is shown below:
Data transformation policies are created by turning on the Data Transformation toggle when creating a Standard policy. These policies require downtime, so they are referred to as offline policies. If you do not want downtime, you can deploy LDT policies.
LDT Policies
As their name implies, LDT policies perform live transformation of data. They do not require any time downtime, so they are referred to as online policies. You can continue to work while the transformation of your data in GuardPoints is in progress. To benefit from LDT, you need to purchase an Add-On LDT license with the CTE Base license.
LDT policies can handle both these cases:
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The GuardPoint does not contain any data. No data is migrated. A production policy is applied to encrypt/decrypt the future data.
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The GuardPoint already contains data. The existing data is automatically migrated. After the data is migrated, the data is encrypted/decrypted like a production policy.
A sample LDT policy is shown below:
COS Policies
These policies are used to encrypt data and apply access rules on the GuardPoints on cloud. CTE supports Amazon S3 buckets.
A sample COS policy is shown below:
IDT Policies
These policies are used to create GuardPoints for Teradata clusters. Access to data is blocked during encryption or rekeying of data.
A sample IDT policy is shown below:
Refer to Protecting Teradata Appliances for details on protecting Teradata appliances.
Policy Elements
To achieve different access privileges based on users, processes, and different resources (sub-directory/specific file formats), create these policy elements:
Refer to Creating Policy Elements for details.
User Sets
Groups of single or multiple users that can be used as individual entities in policies to grant user specific privileges. A sample user set is shown below:
Process Sets
Groups of single or multiple processes that can be used as individual entities in policies to grant process specific privileges.
Resource Sets
Groups of single or multiple resources (sub-directory or specific file formats) that can be used as individual entities in policies to grant resource specific privileges.
