Re: AES-256 and Sensitive Documents

["Penn, Blake C" <blake.penn () SECURITY GATECH EDU>]

Ron,

Which federal regulation is requiring that you use AES-256 exclusively to email documents?

Thanks,

Blake Penn
Information Security Policy and Compliance Manager
Cyber Security
Georgia Institute of Technology
(404) 385-5480


From: The EDUCAUSE Security Community Group Listserv <SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU> On Behalf Of Ronald Loneker
Sent: Wednesday, 28 November, 2018 14:30
To: SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU
Subject: [SECURITY] AES-256 and Sensitive Documents

Good Afternoon All -

Our Financial Aid office would like to have students and their parents, when e-mailing financial aid documents 
containing sensitive information, to comply with federal regulations saying the documents should be e-mailed with 
AES-256 encryption.

Since TLS 1.3 was released and is now in use in Chrome, the TLS 1.3 protocol uses only AES-128 encryption so we're 
considering asking our students and their parents, if e-mailing sensitive documents, to encrypt them with a yet to be 
decided encryption application at the AES-256 level and attach the encrypted file to the e-mail being sent to our 
Financial Aid office.  We would provide links to easy to use, free encryption software and provide directions on how to 
download, install and use it.  We are also considering adding this software to our computer lab images for those 
students who want to e-mail documents but don't have access to a computer at home.

Right now, the other web browsers seem to be using TLS 1.2, currently operating at the AES-256 level, with Firefox and 
Safari saying they expect to move to TLS 1.3 in the near future at some point.

I'm curious as to what other schools are doing, and whether they are putting any sort of language on their website 
saying that documents like this should be encrypted to prevent unauthorized access to the data.

Please note that I am not looking for vendor solicitations.

Ron Loneker, Jr.
Director, IT Special Projects
College of Saint Elizabeth
Henderson Hall, Room 202C
2 Convent Road
Morristown, NJ  07960

Phone:  973-290-4229<tel:973-290-4229>

e-mail:  rloneker () cse edu<mailto:rloneker () cse edu>