1. Filelocker: Simplifying Secure File Transfers
Presented by:
Brett Davis, IT Security Engineer
Copyright William Brett Davis, This work is the intellectual property of the author. Permission is granted for this material to be shared for non-commercial, educational purposes, provided that this copyright statement appears on the reproduced materials and notice is given that the copying is by permission of the author. To disseminate otherwise or to republish requires written permission from the author.

2. Agenda Initial needs Filelocker v1 (currently in production)
Lessons learned and feedback
Filelocker v2 (going to beta soon)
Future Action Items/Plans for v2.5
Questions

3. How do you send sensitive information?
Currently…
How do you send sensitive information?
PGP?
S/MIME?
Encrypted Zip?
Out of band password transmission?
Sneaker-net?
How about larger files???

4. Project Initiating Problems
Faculty and staff would unknowingly use regular to send sensitive data to others
Implementing security campus wide is expensive or complex (but usually both)
Security personnel needed a secure means to communicate back and forth and with end users
is inefficient for sending large files - especially to multiple users
People unknowingly sending infected files
Lack of ability to (easily) authenticate senders of files via
Auditing

5. Sensitive data would hang around on the network for much too long.
and zombies
Sensitive data would hang around on the network for much too long.
We still the effects of this today when someone plugs in an old workstation or server
Oh what secrets the undead have to tell

6. Filelocker v1 Enter Filelocker v1
-Developed in house (WHICH MEANS IT’S FREE RIGHT?)
-Designed around securing the transfer (security in transit, at rest, secure deletion, separation of keys from files, minimized need for pre-shared keys)
-Attempted to be intuitive so that users would be less resistant to adoption and would opt to use it over
-Designed to be efficient for larger files (<1GB) – upload once, download many
-Tied into Purdue’s directory
-Allowed for (relatively) secure sharing out to the public
-Kept history of uploads and downloads (though not easily user accessible)

7. Uploads in Action!
Drawback:Did not allow virus scans and encryption!

8. Sharing and Searching

9. It’s nice but… Feedback
Needs a way to let people outside Purdue upload
Needs groups
Needs bigger files
Mandatory encryption
Can it be used to distribute AV and other security related software?
Can students use it?
If so, can’t they use it to share music!?! OH NO!!!!

10. So Filelocker v2 now has Groups
Larger file upload capacity (arbitrarily large now, max can be set in config)
Upload requests (allows people outside Purdue to upload to Filelocker)
Mandatory encryption
A provision to check file md5 hashes against known copyrighted material – just need to find a database
Ability to scan encrypted files
Among other core and UI upgrades (better OOP, more intuitive interface)
-The alternative to hashes would be disallowing .mp3 extensions or possibly just disallowing them for students.

11. Filelocker V2 UI mock ups
Some of you might find this layout… familiar

12. Upload options

13. Uploads in progress

14. Sharing with other users

15. Public uploads

16. Public Sharing

17. Core is written in Python (CherryPy for the web server) MySQL database
Technologies used
Core is written in Python (CherryPy for the web server)
MySQL database
jQuery and some other JQ plugins (all open source) on the front end to manage concurrent uploads

18. Security Specifics SSL used to encrypt files in transit
Files are spooled to disk
Virus Scan
MD5 calculation and lookup
Encrypted using AES-128
Temp file is securely deleted
Auto-encrypted files store keys in database (which should be on a different server than the file server)
Files are not at risk if only the file server or only the db server is compromised
Files and users have a max lifetime – purged after x days

19. In the works for 2.5
SMB server support (users can link FL to an SMB share – serve files directly from it)
Caveat: No file encryption and credentials for share must be stored by FL!
Secure Messaging (Think Facebook style messages)
Mobile (iPhone, Blackberry) apps
Login federation and ability to “connect” Filelocker instances at different organizations
Desktop application to emulate network drive (maybe…)

20. Can anyone see something like this being adopted at your institution?

21. Beta testing to start mid-May
Where we are now
Beta testing to start mid-May
If anyone is interested in testing at their own site – please send me an at
The core of Filelocker will be open sourced soon (since I know you were going to ask)

22. Suggestions?
Questions?
Have any of you approached secure file sharing in a different way?