SkyLOCK™ Enterprise Encryption Product

Components

Administrator Console

The SkyLOCK™ Administrator console is the core management tool for the enterprise product set.  It allows the organization to manage their licenses and reallocate those licenses between installed/uninstalled encryption clients.  It pushes installation and maintenance packages down to client workstations and manages installation progress. 

One of the primary functions of the administrator is the management of security Policies and their implementation within their organization.  These policies include such items as which type of files and subdirectories must be encrypted, how quickly files must be re-encrypted after use, how strong the encryption algorithm will be and a host of other client options.  All these policies can be managed with the Administrator Console. 

In addition to the policy management functions, the administrator must manage user keys and credentials.  With the Administrator console, the security officer can backup individual encryption keys, and set user credentials.  This is probably one of the more critical functions. 

 

SkyLINK Group Administration Console

Within the SkyLOCK Enterprise product set one of the extended capabilities is the ability to share encrypted files among authorized users.  In normal circumstances, file encryption is not only tied to user credential, it is controlled by a hardware fingerprint.  This means not only must one know the credentials of the encrypted file, they would normally need access to the computer that originally encrypted the file.  By utilizing this approach SkyLOCK enhances the security of AES encryption.     While this feature enhances security, it makes sharing encrypted file much more problematic.  In order to mitigate this feature we created a product enhancement that allows an administrator  to the define groups of users that can encrypt and decrypt one another's files.  This enhancement is called SkyLINK. 

SkyLINK allows a local group administer to create a groups and enroll users in these groups.  A group would normally include two or more related users.  As an example a personnel group might be defined and all people eligible to see payroll data would be enrolled in that group.  When they wanted to secure and share files they would encrypt those files as part of the payroll group.  When a member of the payroll group sent that file to another user within the group, or accessed it from a shared drive, they would be able to decrypt and read the file.  Anyone else would not be able to decrypt the file.  One copy of SkyLINK is  included with the Enterprise version, additional copies may be purchased for distributed group management.

SkyLOCK Encryption Client

The SkyLOCK Encryption Client is the installed set of functions deployed on a user workstation.   These functions include the baseline encrypt and decryption functions.  They also include provisions for changing the Passphrase and pin number for a specific user.  These functions are executable with a variety of mechanism.  The simplest way to encrypt a file is right click the specific file.  Contained on the menu will be an item to encrypt the file, or if this person is a member of one or more groups, a group encrypt menu item will be present.  To decrypt an encrypted file, one would just double click in the file.  The file will be decrypted and the editor for that file will be invoked.  Encryption and decryption can also be performed by dragging and dropping the file on the appropriate icons or by double clicking the icons and selected the files one wishes to encrypt or decrypt.

There are also automatic functions that can be set by the user, if they are not in conflict with parameters set by the system administrator.  These functions allow one to set which files, file types or subdirectory may be automatically encrypted.  They could automatically encrypt any file placed on a removable device.   These automatic functions could also be set to decrypt a number of related files when any individual file is encrypted.  These automatic functions are designed to make securing an organizations critical assets as seamless and unobtrusive as possible to the user community.

SkyLOCK is a trademark of Encryption Solutions, Inc in the United States and/or other countries.