As always, the secret of encryption is key management. In my opinion the
only solutions out there are Decru or Neoscale. My personal favourite is
neoscale.
NetWorker encryption, just like any backup product, is a tick item only.
So, what should you look for in key management for backups?
Well the devices should be application aware. I know Neoscale is, and I
believe Decru is as well. This means you could, if you wish, selectively
perform encryption on some tapes and not on others.
Key management should be able to separate the roles of administrator and
security officer (not possible with NetWorker)
Key management should provide "clustering", so multiple devices can share
the same keys if you choose
Key management should enable you to say something like "If I loose my keys,
I have 5 security officers. Any 3 can come together and recreate the keys"
Key management should provide a failover capability so that a device at a
remote site would have the same keys as a local one (DR)
Encryption should enable you to compress then encrypt (NetWorker can't)
Hope that helps
Siobhan
On 11/1/08 2:08 PM, "Stan Horwitz" <stan AT TEMPLE DOT EDU> wrote:
> On Jan 10, 2008, at 9:38 PM, David Magda wrote:
>
>> On Jan 10, 2008, at 16:35, lemons_terry AT emc DOT com wrote:
>>
>>> All of these require a supporting environment to provide key
>>> management, drive configuration, etc. For the TS1120 and T10000A
>>> at least, this adds tens of thousands of dollars to the cost of the
>>> drive itself, in my experience.
>>
>> I'm probably missing something, but why can't Networker do the key
>> management?
>>
>> I would think that the logical way to implement encryption for these
>> tape drives to have a SCSI command where you send a key and say
>> "enable encryption". The back up software would then keep the key in
>> its database and tie it to the back up session.
>
> Do you propose that some Joe NetWorker administrator have access to
> his or her organization's security keys? I for one would not want to
> have that level of responsibility. The person who holds the keys
> should be in the data security group, not the backup group. I have
> experimented with NetWorker 7.4's encryption feature last summer. As
> soon as I got it working, my boss asked me never to use it again,
> which is what I was hoping would happen. What would happen if the only
> person who knows what the encryption key is gets struck by lightning
> after having just changed the key in NetWorker? Without the key that
> was used when an encrypted backup is done, recovering that data would
> be impossible.
>
>> Then, when you want to restore or clone, Networker (or whatever)
>> would look up the file's save set, get the key, send it to the
>> drive, and tell it to decrypt the data as it comes off the media.
>>
>> Does anyone know of any documents or white papers that describes the
>> architecture of this?
>
> Google is your friend. My favorite way to do encryption is
> http://www.ingrian.com
> but there are also other options.
>
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Siobhán
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