The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has been in the news recently for wrong reasons. It was criticized for inadequately securing vital information of more than 3 million pilots that it certifies. This news was recently published on govinfosecurity.com.

The Inspector General’s office stated that critical information is “vulnerable to unauthorized access and use and potential falsification of medical certificates that could lead to unfit airmen being medically certified to fly.” The report identified that FAA had not implemented adequate security measures, such as multi-factor authentication and encryption, as required by the Office of Management and Budget and the Department of Transportation.

According to the news story, the investigation report recommends strong steps to make data secure and such measures include the extensive use of encryption and multi-factor authentication.

This incident brings out the criticality of both encryption and authentication. However, without authentication, encryption is useless. The ideal solution would be to have both together managed at the enterprise level.

Is there a solution?

SECUDE’s FinallySecure Enterprise provides both encryption and authentication. It is the first link in the authentication chain, providing an adaptive technology with risk management and productivity gains for end-to-end security. This allows businesses to survive, adapt, and grow in a heterogeneous IT ecosystem. Pre-Boot Authentication enables encryption of the entire hard drive from temporary files to the operating system itself. FinallySecure Enterprise utilizes a Linux pre-boot partition to authenticate and authorize users before booting to the operating system. Also, it is the first solution in the world that works with both software and hardware Full Disk Encryption (FDE) technology. It has the ability to encrypt only used sectors of the HDD, thus dramatically speeding up the initial encryption process. With hardware FDE, encryption is done on the fly with a dedicated chip embedded into the HDD itself and not in the CPU.

For large organizations such as the FAA, encryption may be a hassle due to the impracticality of installing for numerous end users. However, FinallySecure Enterprise provides centralized management with remote configuration, remote decommissioning, an intuitive interface, and synchronization with Microsoft Active Directory™.

FinallySecure Enterprise offers companies an out-of-the-box migration path from software- to hardware-based FDE using a single installation package and license.

For more information about this solution, visit www.secude.com.