- How Does Your Organization Currently Generate Encryption Keys In Firefox
- How Does Your Organization Currently Generate Encryption Keys 2017
Keys are integral to modern day public key infrastructure (PKI) and encryption as a whole. Keys in cryptography are like the rice to your sushi or the cream filling for your Oreo cookies — they’re essential components. In the olden days (you know, before modern technology), a key was the secret roadmap, if you will, of an encryption technique. Protect your most critical data and your access to it by following these tips for securing encryption keys. Strong encryption is a central and essential defense in the battle to protect sensitive data. The process of encrypting data is not that challenging, and the tools to do it are not that complicated.
- Once the common denominator has been created, you can create more specific keys such as a 'Management' key, an 'Accounts' etc. Create Encryption Key Groups. Once you have created all of your Encryption Keys, you will then need to create your Encryption Key Groups, to do this click the 'Encryption Key Groups' tab and click the 'Create' button.
- Oct 20, 2017 An encryption key is a random string of bits created explicitly for scrambling and unscrambling data. Encryption keys are designed with algorithms intended to ensure that every key is unpredictable and unique. The longer the key built in this manner, the harder it is to crack the encryption code.
Office 365 provides baseline, volume-level encryption enabled through BitLocker and Distributed Key Manager (DKM). Office 365 offers an added layer of encryption at the application level for your content. This content includes data from Exchange Online, Skype for Business, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Teams files. This added layer of encryption is called service encryption.
How service encryption, BitLocker, and Customer Key work together
Service encryption ensures that content at rest is encrypted at the application layer. Your data is always encrypted at rest in the Office 365 service with BitLocker and DKM. For more information, see the 'Security, Privacy, and Compliance Information for Office 365', and How Exchange Online secures your email secrets. Customer Key provides additional protection against viewing of data by unauthorized systems or personnel, and complements BitLocker disk encryption in Microsoft datacenters. Service encryption is not meant to prevent Microsoft personnel from accessing customer data. The primary purpose is to assist customers in meeting regulatory or compliance obligations for controlling root keys. Customers explicitly authorize O365 services to use their encryption keys to provide value added cloud services, such as eDiscovery, anti-malware, anti-spam, search indexing, etc.
Customer Key is built on service encryption and lets you provide and control encryption keys. Office 365 then uses these keys to encrypt your data at rest as described in the Online Services Terms (OST). Customer Key helps you meet compliance obligations because you control the encryption keys that Office 365 uses to encrypt and decrypt data.
Customer Key enhances the ability of your organization to meet the demands of compliance requirements that specify key arrangements with the cloud service provider. With Customer Key, you provide and control the root encryption keys for your Office 365 data at-rest at the application level. As a result, you exercise control over your organization's keys. If you decide to exit the service, you revoke access to your organization's root keys. For all Office 365 services, revoking access to the keys is the first step on the path towards data deletion. By revoking access to the keys, the data is unreadable to the service.
Customer Key encrypts data at rest in Office 365
How Does Your Organization Currently Generate Encryption Keys In Firefox
Using keys you provide, Customer Key for Office 365 encrypts:
- SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Teams files.
- Files uploaded to OneDrive for Business.
- Exchange Online mailbox content including e-mail body content, calendar entries, and the content within email attachments.
- Text conversations from Skype for Business.
We don't currently offer customer control of the encryption keys for Skype Meeting Broadcast and Skype Meeting content uploads. Instead, this content is encrypted along with all other content in Office 365.
Customer Key with hybrid deployments
Customer Key only encrypts data at rest in the cloud. Customer Key does not work to protect your on-premises mailboxes and files. You can encrypt your on-premises data using another method, such as BitLocker.
About the data encryption policy (DEP)
A data encryption policy defines the encryption hierarchy to encrypt data using each of the keys you provide as well as the availability key protected by Microsoft. You create DEPs using PowerShell cmdlets, which are different for each service, and assign those DEPs to encrypt application data. For example:
Exchange Online and Skype for Business You can create up to 50 DEPs per tenant. You associate DEPs to your Customer Keys in Azure Key Vault and then assign DEPs to individual mailboxes. When you assign a DEP to a mailbox:
the mailbox is marked for a mailbox move. Based on priorities in Office 365 as described here Move requests in the Office 365 service.
The encryption takes place while the mailbox is moved. Allow 72 hours for the mailbox to become encrypted with the new DEP. If the mailboxes aren't encrypted after waiting 72 hours from the time you assigned the DEP, contact Microsoft.
Later, you can either refresh the DEP or assign a different DEP to the mailbox as described in Manage Customer Key for Office 365. Each mailbox must have appropriate licenses in order to assign a DEP. For more information about licensing, see Before you set up Customer Key.
SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Teams files If you're using the multi-geo feature, you can create up to one DEP per geo for your organization. You can use different Customer Keys for each geo. If you're not using the multi-geo feature, you can only create one DEP per tenant. When you assign the DEP, encryption begins automatically but can take some time to complete. Refer to the details in Set up Customer Key for Office 365.
Leaving the service
Customer Key assists you in meeting compliance obligations by allowing you to revoke your keys when you leave the Office 365 service. When you revoke your keys as part of leaving the service, the availability key is deleted resulting in cryptographic deletion of your data. Cryptographic deletion mitigates the risk of data remanence which is important for meeting both security and compliance obligations. For information about the data purge process and key revocation, see Revoke your keys and start the data purge path process.
Encryption ciphers used by Customer Key
Customer Key uses a variety of encryption ciphers to encrypt keys as shown in the following figures.