CHANNEL - Protecting Documents

CONTENTS

General

Fall 2016

Protecting Documents

Y F Lai
Head of Infrastructure Systems

Data is among the University’s assets and must be protected. HKUST community members who require access to institutional data in support of the University’s teaching, research, administration and outreach missions must comply with the strictest standards of security and confidentiality.

How to protect your files?

ITSC has published a website to describe various ways of protecting your important files:

Protect Document Files with Right Management System (RMS)
Protect Microsoft Office Files with Password Encryption
Protect PDF Files with Password Encryption
Protect Multiple Files by using Zip Utility

As the above methods (except RMS) adopt encryption technologies, they share the common limitation of encryption key storage and distribution. This limits their scale of deployment to only very small workgroups. However, RMS being a more sophisticated solution, beyond simple encryption, it provides the rights management of the file, i.e. who can access and how to limit the usage of the protected file.

What is the Rights Management (RMS) sharing application?

The Microsoft Rights Management (RMS) sharing application helps you keep important documents (Word, PDF, Excel, PowerPoint etc.) and pictures safe from people who shouldn't see them, even if the files are accidentally released to unauthorized persons. RMS leverages on identity-based encryption. This means ITSC username and password are used for encrypting and decrypting data. Users do not need to invent an arbitrary password each time when a file is required to be encrypted.

For details, please check out the website: http://itsc.ust.hk/services/cyber-security/rms-protection. If you have specific file protection needs, you are welcome to discuss with us by sending email to cchelp@ust.hk.